Walt Whitman and the World (Iowa Whitman Series)

Contents

Acknowledgments, xi INTRODUCTION:

"Salut au Monde!" Ed Folsom and Gay Wilson Allen, 1

M. Wynn Thomas, Charles OIlier (1856), 20 Anonymous Review (1856), 21 Edmund OIlier (?) (1856), 23 Matthew Arnold (1866), 25 William Michael Rossetti (1868), 25 Anne Gilchrist (1870), 27 Algernon Charles Swinburne (1872), 29 George Saintsbury (1874), 30 Edward Dowden (1878),32 Gerard Manley Hopkins (1882),33 John Robertson (1884),36 John Robertson [epigraphs] (1884),37 Ernest Rhys (1885), 38 Roden Noel (1886),38 Anonymous Review (1886),39 Havelock Ellis (1890), 40 R. W. Raper (1890), 41 Pauline W. Roose (1892), 42 W. B. Yeats (1892, 1894), 43 John Addington Symonds (1893), 44 Henry Salt (1894), 46 Edmund Gosse (1896), 47 J. A. MacCulloch (1899), 48 G. K. Chesterton (19 0 4), 49 W. T. Hawkins (1906),50 E. M. Forster (1911), 51 D. H. Lawrence (1913), 52 Basil de Selincourt (1914), 53 P. Mansell Jones (1914),55 John Cowper Powys (1915), 56 Padraic Colum (1919),57 Hugh rAnson Faussett (1942),59 V. S. Pritchett (1946), 59 J. Middleton Murry (1955), 61

WHITMAN IN THE BRITISH ISLES.

11

David Daiches (1956), 62 W. H. Auden (1963), 63 Anthony Burgess (1968), 64 Denis Donoghue (1975), 65 Geoffrey Grigson (1982), 66 Charles Tomlinson (1984), 67 John Bayley (1984), 67 Charles Tomlinson (1986), 68 Tom Paulin (1991), 69 WHITMAN IN SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA.

Fernando Alegria, 71

Jose Marti (1887), 96 Ruben Dario (1890), 106 Cebria Montoliu (1909), 107 Miguel de Unamuno (1930),113 Leon Felipe (1941), 115 Pablo Neruda (1954), 118 Jorge Luis Borges (1966), 126 Jorge Guillen (1971), 127 Maria Clara Bonetti Paro, Gilberto Freire (1948), 137

WHITMAN IN BRAZIL.

128

Roger Asselineau and Susan M. Brown, 147 Fernando Pessoa (1915), 154

WHITMAN IN PORTUGAL.

WHITMAN IN THE GERMAN-SPEAKING COUNTRIES.

Ferdinand Freiligrath (1868), 172 Johannes Schlaf (1892), 176 Hermann Hesse (1904), 186 Eduard Bertz (1905-1922), 187 Gustav Landauer (1907), 189 Hermann Bahr (1919), 193 Thomas Mann (1922), 201 Hans Reisiger (1922), 202 Christian Morgenstern (1910), 209 Arthur Drey (1911), 211 Gustav Gamper (1919), 212 Hans Reinhart (1919), 213 Carl Albert Lange (1926), 214 Kurt Tucholsky (1925) 215 Johannes R. Becher (1945), 217 Gabriele Eckart (1971), 218

[ viii]

Contents

Walter Grunzweig,

160

Jiirgen Wellbrock (1976), 220 Hans Sahl (1962), 222 Roland Kluge (1984), 224 Rolf Schwendter (1990), 226 WHITMAN IN THE NETHERLANDS.

Gay Wilson Allen, 231

WHITMAN IN FRANCE AND BELGIUM.

Roger Asselineau, 233

Valery Larbaud (1918), 245 Jean Catel (1929), 256 Jules Romains (1972),.266 Roger Asselineau, 268 Giovanni Papini (1908), 274 Cesare Pavese (1951), 274

WHITMAN IN ITALY.

WHITMAN IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA.

Arthur Golden, Marija Golden,

and Igor Maver, 282 WHITMAN IN POLAND.

F. Lyra, 295

Stephen Stepanchev, 300 Anonymous Review (1914),313 D. S. Mirsky (1935),320 Kornei 1. Chukovsky (1969),333 Maurice Mendelson (1976),336

WHITMAN IN RUSSIA.

Carl L. Anderson, 339 Artur Lundkvist (1929),351 Artur Lundkvist (1976), 353

WHITMAN IN SWEDEN.

WHITMAN IN DENMARK AND NORWAY.

Gay Wilson Allen, 357

Knut Hamsun (1889),362 Johannes V. Jensen (1919),369 Kjell Krogvig (1948),372 Sigmund Skard (1973), 377 WHITMAN IN FINLAND.

WHITMAN IN ISRAEL.

WHITMAN IN INDIA.

Niilo Peltola, 381

Ezra Greenspan, 386

V. K. Chari, 396

Contents

[ix]

Guiyou Huang, 406 Li Yeguang (1981), 422 Li Yeguang (19 88 ), 425

WHITMAN IN CHINA.

WHITMAN IN JAPAN.

Takashi Kodaira and Alfred H. Marks, 429

Selected Bibliographies, 437 Notes on Contributors, 467

[x ]

Contents

Acknowledgments

This project was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and by the generosity of C. Esco Obermann. The NEH grant and Mr. Obermann's support allowed the editors to bring together most of the contributors to this volume in 1992 at the University of Iowa Center for Advanced Studies, where a two-day seminar on Whitman in translation was held. The details of this book were hammered out at that meeting. The editors are grateful to the NEH for continuing support during the completion of the book and to the University of Iowa Center for Advanced Studies and its director, Jay Semel, for extraordinary help and hospitality throughout the years of the Whitman Centennial Project. Dan Lewis played a major role in the complex job of gathering and editing the materials for this volume. Victoria Brehm offered valuable editorial and organizational help in the project's early stages. Abigail Metcalf helped in the later stages. Roger Asselineau wishes to express his debt to a number of Italian colleagues who supplied him with books, articles, and information: Marina Camboni, Mario Corona, Andrea Mariani, and Francesca Orestano in particular, as well as Alessandra Pinto Surdi, whose updated bibliography of Whitman's reception in Italy was especially precious. He is also grateful to Jose Augusto Seabra, Portuguese ambassador with UNESCO in Paris, and Susan Brown for their help with Portugal. Ezra Greenspan thanks Riki Greenspan for help with gathering and translating material and Yehoiadah Amir for turning his attention to the work of Gershom Scholem. Guiyou Huang is grateful to Kenneth M. Price for encouragement and help in writing the essay on Whitman and China. The editors also wish to recognize the many scholars, poets, translators, and Whitman enthusiasts who have worked tirelessly over the years to carry Whitman's work into various cultures through a variety of media and languages. One outstanding example is Robert Strassburg, one of the most prolific composers of musical interpretations of Whitman's poems. Strassburg, professor emeritus of music at California State University, Los Angeles, has set many Whitman texts to music. His Leaves ofGrass symphony had its premiere performance in Japan, and a recording of the symphony continues to be played frequently on Japanese national radio. He is now at work on an opera about Whitman in New Orleans. He edits a quarterly newsletter dedicated to worldwide Whitman activities, and his tireless efforts to foster an international understanding of Whitman serve as a model of committed scholarship.

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Introduction: "Salut au Monde!" If it hadn't been for Emerson's electrifying letter greeting Whitman at "the beginning of a great career," the first edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, would have been a total failure; few copies were sold, and Emerson and Whitman seemed about the only people who recognized much promise in it. Undaunted, Whitman published an expanded second edition in 1856, in which he included a visionary poem (then called "Poem of Salutation," later to become "Salut au Monde!") containing this prophetic exclamation:

My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the whole earth, I have look'd for equals and lovers and found them ready for me in all lands, I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them. (LG, 148) He boasted that this new edition would sell several thousand copies, but it turned out to be an even greater failure than the first. What we now see as prophecy appeared in 1856 as nothing more than boastful fantasy, for it would be many years before Whitman would become known in other lands. Throughout his life, though, he would maintain this international dream; in 1881, while expressing hope that a projected Russian translation of Leaves would soon become a reality, he noted:

As my dearest dream is for an internationality of poems and poets, binding the lands of the earth closer than all treaties and diplomacy - As the purpose beneath the rest in my book is such hearty comradeship, for individuals to begin with, and for all the nations of the earth as a result - how happy I should be to get the hearing and emotional contact of the great Russian peoples. l Eventually Whitman would find "equals and lovers" quite literally around the world, a true "internationality" of "hearty comradeship." Today, complete translations of Leaves of Grass have been published in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, and China, and selections ofWhitman's poetry have appeared in every major language except Arabic. Scores of biographical and critical books on Whitman have been published on every continent. This book sets out to trace some of the ways Whitman has been absorbed into cultures from around the world for more than a century. From nation to nation, Whitman's poetry and prose have generated a wide variety of aesthetic, political, and religious responses. Since no American writer has been more influential in more nations than Whitman, the materials in this book demonstrate some important ways that American culture, as articulated in Whitman's work, has helped redefine older and more established national traditions and how it has helped emerging nations define themselves. These materials also show how various national cultures have reconstructed Whitman in order to make him fit their native patterns. This book presents and examines, then, some radically realigned versions of Whitman, as his writing-translated into other languages and absorbed into other traditions - undertakes a different kind of cultural work than it performs in the United States. To accomplish this overview of responses, we organized an international group of writers and scholars, each with expertise in both Whitman and the culture about which they write. This group of distinguished scholars corresponded with each other and eventually met in Iowa City in 1992 to discuss the project in detail; their collaboration has resulted in one of the first sustained explorations of a major American writer's influence on world literature. Our goal has been to bring together the most illuminating responses to Whitman from every culture in which we could identify significant work on Whitman. The book is organized in sections, each one offering a careful analysis of the ways that Whitman has been absorbed into a particular culture and then offering selections from writings about Whitman by poets and critics from that culture. The size and detail of each section of this book reflect the range and depth of the particular national response to Whitman. For cultures that have long and manifold responses to Leaves of Grass, like Great Britain, we have chosen to present brief excerpts from a large number of respondents, indicating the wealth of materials available. Where particular essays have had a dramatic impact on Whitman's reputation in a given culture, as Jose Marti's did in Spanish-speaking countries or as Ferdinand Freiligrath's and Johannes Schlaf's did in Germany, we have devoted more space to those individual responses. In countries where the re[ 2 ]

Introduction

sponse to Whitman has so far been fragmentary but still noteworthy, we offer only a historical and critical overview, with few or no selections. Selected bibliographies at the back of the volume list major translations and key critical writings. This book began as an updating of Gay Wilson Allen's Walt Whitman Abroad (1955), but it quickly turned into a project that involved reconceptualizing and vastly revising the earlier work. While we reprint some pieces that appeared in Walt Whitman Abroad, much of the material is new, and the overviews have been completely rewritten to reflect the overwhelming changes of the past forty years-changes both in the cultures represented and in their views of Whitman. Walt Whitman Abroad contained no section on Great Britain, since at that time Harold Blodgett's Walt Whitman in England (1934) still seemed to cover the ground adequately. Blodgett's study now needs to be supplemented, however, and we are pleased to present M. Wynn Thomas's up-to-date overview of Whitman in the British Isles. Walt Whitman Abroad also did not include any of the poems that poets from around the world have addressed to Whitman over the past century. In 1981, in Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, Jim Perlman, Ed Folsom, and Dan Campion collected many of the poems that demonstrated how poets from Whitman's time to the present have continued to engage in a dialogue with Whitman, literally "talking back" to him just as he talked forward to "Poets to Come." This ongoing poetic dialogue with Whitman was not limited to American poets, and in this book we present a selection of poems, many appearing for the first time in English translation, that demonstrates just how remarkably international the "talking back" to Whitman has been. We had hoped to present a study of Whitman in African nations, but that important topic remains to be done. Certainly Whitman has generated African responses, from white South Africans like Jan Christiaan Smuts, a former prime minister who wrote one of the earliest critical studies of Whitman, and novelist Alan Paton, to important black writers like Ngugi wa T'hiongo, who has used Whitman's poetry as epigraphs for his novels, and Syl Cheney-Coker, a Sierra Leone poet who has written Whitman-inspired poems, including his own "Children of Adam." But the responses have yet to be gathered, studied, and sorted according to the multitude of national and tribal traditions in Africa. This important project awaits a generation of critics to come. From the 1860s to the present, Whitman's poetry has been remarkably influential in an international context. Before he was widely viewed as a significant writer in the United States, Whitman was already taken seriously by readers in many countries as an author who carefully and imaginatively defined the problematics of democracy. Until well into the twentieth century, in fact, he was more highly regarded and more widely read in several European countries than he was in the United States. His international impact has continued to grow throughout this century, and he has helped generations ofwriters - in Europe, Latin America, the Indian subcontinent, and emerging African nations - to formulate and challenge democratic assumptions and attitudes. As Gay Wilson Allen noted in his preface Introduction

[3 ]

to Walt Whitman Abroad, "Time after time the critics in other lands have seen in Whitman's crudities-or fancied crudities-the awkwardness of a young nation, an immature giant which has not yet learned its own strength." Allen suggested that "these foreign critics of Whitman may help Americans to understand themselves [and] to understand the misconceptions about themselves that they must overcome." 2 Now, forty years later, the United States perhaps seems less of an "immature giant," but the culture clearly remains just as much in need of help in defining itself. Critics and poets from other cultures still turn to Whitman for the materials out of which they define the United States. Huck Gutman has observed, in the introduction to a recent collection of essays investigating international perspectives on American literature, that the great value of such a global view "is the manner in which the study and reception of American literature reveals national identity. When one culture abuts another, the way in which one encounters or assimilates the other is defining in special ways." Gutman's collection (in which Whitman is notably absent) sets out to provide "a sense of just how thoroughly - or partially- American culture has penetrated other cultures, and with what sort of impact." 3 Walt Whitman and the World provides a case study of how one of the best-known representatives of American culture has carried his democratic message into an array of other cultures and how those cultures have responded to that message. Questions concerning the nature of a democratic political system, a democratic art, a democratic sexuality, and a democratic religion are central concerns of Whitman's, and they have been key components of countless international responses to Whitman. His impact was felt in the Soviet Union, where he was read as a kind of socialist prophet (it will be interesting to see just where and how he continues to be read in the myriad countries emerging from the collapse of the USSR), and it is beginning to be felt in China, where a full translation of Leaves of Grass is now available (after having been delayed by Chinese authorities for fear of the impact it might have had during the Tiananmen Square student democratic uprisings a few years ago). It is no accident that Whitman's influence has been most dramatically apparent in countries that are in the midst of democratic revolutions and deep social change. Whitman's poetry has in the last few years been translated into Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian and was published in Yugoslavia just before that country disintegrated into ethnic states, and the first major edition of his prose work to appear in East Germany was published less than five years before the Berlin Wall came down. From early on, Whitman has been read in other cultures as a poet of revolution, and his influence has been notably cross-cultural, as writers from one nationality export or import him with ease into another. One of the earliest critics to become interested in Whitman was the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, who published an essay on Whitman in 1868; he first encountered Whitman's works while he was living in England as an exile because of his rebellion against political tyranny in Germany. Several radicals in Britain had recently discovered [4 ]

Introduction

Whitman (he was embraced there mostly by liberals, militant democrats, and proto-socialists), and it was their discussion of him in periodicals that attracted Freiligrath's attention. In 1871 Algernon Swinburne addressed a poem to Whitman, celebrating him as a prophet of liberty, a "strong-winged soul with propheticlips hot with the blood-beats of song» (Swinburne would eventually include this poem in his Songs Before Sunrise, a book dedicated to Giuseppe Mazzini, leader of a revolution in Italy), and in 1878 Edward Dowden hailed the American poet as the "poet of democracy.» Some Chinese poets came to know Whitman first while living in exile in France, and the German Erich Arendt engaged Whitman's work while exiled in Latin America. Wherever he was first encountered, and in whatever language, his writings usually seemed to speak democratic revolution. Actually, Whitman wrote very few poems about political revolution, though his 1855 edition did contain two: a satirical poem later entitled "A Boston Ballad» and another that lamented and celebrated the failed revolts in various European countries in 1848-49 (later entitled "Europe, the 72nd and 73d Years of These States»). His "Europe» poem offered both consolation and prophecy: "Not a grave of the murder'd for freedom but grows seed for freedom, in its turn to bear seed, / Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish» (LG, 268). Such sentiments appealed to some of the young Russian poets and journalists during the abortive Russian revolt in 1905 and again, more widely, during the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Earlier, a Russian journalist named V. Popov had called Whitman "the spirit of revolt,» the champion of all those oppressed by tyranny: this was the Whitman who appealed to the Bolsheviks, who distributed translations of his poems in military camps. But Whitman was not read only for his revolutionary political impulses. Others turned to him for what he could teach them about poetry or about themselves: Franz Kafka, for example, found him "among the greatest formal innovators in the modern lyric,» and in Portugal Fernando Pessoa celebrated Whitman's «wild and gentle brotherhood with everything,» finding in the American poet wonderfully incongruous personalities that opened up new possibilities for subjectivity. Whitman's ability to reconcile contradictions, to resist the valorization of soul over body, has led many Indian writers to hear ancient Hindu voices at the heart of Whitman's poetry. Whatever his sources, the remarkable thing about Whitman's appeal to his readers is that everyone seems to find in his poetry what she or he wants and needs. So the Russians, unhappy under their czar, perceived in Whitman's poems «the spirit of revolt and pride,» while later Soviet Communists admired the way he «defines the solidarity of interests of working people ... and foretells the advent of brotherhood of all nations.» In France he was admired early in the twentieth century by the Symbolists and a few years later by the pan-social Unanimists, while still others, like Andre Gide, found fellowship in Whitman the homosexual. During the first Whitman cult in Germany, he was admired for his cosmic world outlook and was compared to Beethoven and Bismarck; during World War I, Introduction

[5]

German soldiers were attracted by Drum-Taps and carried translations of his poems in the trenches; after the war, the German labor press discovered Whitman and used him for their propaganda; in 1922 Thomas Mann, in his famous "Von Deutscher Republik" speech, praised Whitman and Novalis as archetypes of American democracy and German humanity. Once we begin to trace the fertile and shifting responses, the examples proliferate; this book provides an abundance of materials out of which illuminating new international influence studies can be constructed. In a surprisingly large number of nations, then, important writers have responded in significant ways to Whitman - ways that help define the intersections between American culture and other cultures, ways that help define the varied possibilities for the construction of democracies, and ways that help define an emerging international culture. Jorge Luis Borges said that Whitman "wrote his rhapsodies in the role of an imaginary self, formed partly of himself, partly of each of his readers." This is why so many readers find not only Whitman but also themselves in his poems, and it is why so many nations find in his work aspects of and challenges to their own cultures. No other poet in English since Shakespeare has appealed to so many people in so many places in so many ways. In the United States, during this century, an awareness of Whitman's international influence has slowly evolved. Even in Whitman's own lifetime, the poet's disciples were actively involved in gathering and responding to essays on the poet published in European countries, and Whitman's follower Horace Traubel used his wide association of socialist contacts to form an International Walt Whitman Fellowship. As Whitman scholarship developed in the twentieth century, however, most American critics lost touch with the developing foreign reputation of Whitman and instead turned their attention to Whitman's American connections and to his native roots. During the era of New Criticism, with its insistence on viewing poetic texts as self-enclosed art objects, Whitman's poetry came to seem both loosely symbolic and embarrassingly nationalistic. Meanwhile, Whitman's reputation in other countries was developing along quite different lines, lines that were invisible to most American scholars until Gay Wilson Allen's Walt Whitman Handbook was published in 1946. Allen devoted a chapter to Walt Whitman and world literature, and he developed his analysis in Walt Whitman Abroad, which offered the first gathering of international responses. In 1955 that book came as something of a shock to scholars who had learned to view Whitman in more insular ways. Books gradually began to appear that viewed Whitman in particular cultural contexts: Harold Blodgett had already written on Whitman in England, as had Fernando Alegria on Whitman in Hispanoamerica; soon, V. K. Chari would write on Whitman and Indian traditions; later, Betsy Erkkila on Whitman among the French; and most recently, Walter Griinzweig on Whitman in German-speaking cultures. Essays appeared tracing Whitman's influence on countries as diverse as Russia, Brazil, Israel,

[ 6]

Introduction

China, and Finland. It became clear that a multinational and quite diverse response to Whitman had been forming for more than a century, but, while individual pockets were known, there had been no attempt to assess the full range of responses. The ways that a writer of one nationality begins to influence writers of another nationality-and then becomes more generally absorbed into the culture-are obviously complex. When language barriers exist, the patterns of influence become even more difficult to trace, especially in the case of poetry, where the radical and innovative use of language embeds the text even more firmly in the originating culture. Usually some significant translation of the author's work into the host country's language is the first step in developing international influence, and that is generally followed by critical responses to the work in translation. This book takes the next step, translating this international critical response to Whitman back into English and investigating the nature of the response, so that the international reaction can in turn begin to have an impact on Americans' comprehension of Whitm~n's importance. Walt Whitman and the World completes the circle, allowing the insights that have been gained by reading Whitman in other cultural contexts to impinge on the rather provincial understanding of Whitman held by many American readers and writers, who tend still to view him only in an American context and ,vho tend to be oblivious to the variety of ways that Whitman has been construed for the purposes and needs of other cultures. One of the most persistent concerns about the field of American Studies and American Literature in the past half century has been its provincialism, its insistence that American literature can only be understood in national terms, in relation to the opening of the American West, in relation to the Civil War, in relation to the search for a distinctly American literature. Such approaches to American literature were necessary to offset the earlier perception of the nation's writing as simply a subset of British literature, a colonial literature best read in the context of and judged in relation to the tradition of English literature in the old country. But the work of defining the national origins and goals of American literature is largely complete, and more recent concerns in the field now call for a wider understanding of the multicultural forces that have combined to form what we call "American" literature: Spanish influences, Japanese and Chinese contributions, Amerindian influences, African influences. It is vital to see the melding of various ethnic traditions that form American literature, and such a melding was exactly what Whitman celebrated about his country's emerging literary and political traditions. He saw a time when democratic literature would transcend national boundaries, and he did his best to encourage an international reaction to his work, to generate a debate on the nature of democratic literature that would eventually produce poets from around the world who would carry on and refine the project he began. But even Whitman would have been startled by the variety of reactions to his work and by the multitude of ways that his call for a democratic literature has

Introduction

[7 ]

been heard. The tracking of this international response, then, is one way that American literature can be conceptualized outside of national boundaries and outside of "English" influences and reactions. This book internationalizes our perception of American literature by demonstrating how various cultures appropriate an American writer who ceases to sound quite so narrowly "American" as soon as he is read into another culture's traditions. Those readers interested primarily in American literature will find this study yielding fascinating insights into and responses to American cultural concerns and will discover how differently American literary traditions appear to those who are more distant from the localized historical, political, and economic factors that surrounded nineteenth-century writers. We have set out to challenge narrow nationalistic views of American authors by placing America's most important poet clearly and fully in a remarkably wide international context and by assessing the ways that other cultures have adapted an important American writer for their own political, artistic, and religious needs. Those readers interested in reception theory and those interested in the problematics of translation will find here a detailed case study of the multicultural reception of a major figure. If, as is often claimed, poetry is what is lost in translation, this book demonstrates just what new poetry emerges in the act of translation itself, so that often it is not Whitman who influences another culture so much as Whitman-as-rendered-by a particularly influential translator (as was the case with Ferdinand Freiligrath and Johannes Schlaf in German-speaking cultures). No poet has generated more responses from other writers than Whitman has. Authors from around the world have written poems and essays and books that directly respond to questions that Whitman raised; they literally talk back to him, across time, across cultures, across languages. Whitman always addressed his work to "poets to come," and those later writers have taken up his challenge by arguing with him, adapting his innovations, realigning his sympathies, and developing his insights. This gathering of a wide array of international responses forms a tapestry that reveals for the first time the overall patterns of the century-long response to Whitman, a pattern that has much to do with the way democratic ideals, democratic attitudes, and democratic institutions are perceived around the world. It should be emphasized that, while the nature of democracy and of democratic art is at the heart of Whitman's influence, the patterns of his reception in other cultures are complex and far from jingoistic. There is little evidence of any such phenomenon as Whitman/America conquering the world in the name of democracy. Instead, there are complex weaves of influence, resistance, realignment' and application - a kind of resistant "talking back" to Whitman by other cultures, a dialogue that challenges as much as it affirms. Whitman thus enters each culture as a singular figure; his views of democracy and of democratic art are distinctly reconfigured by every culture he enters. The act of translation itself alters his poetry and makes it conform in ways it otherwise [ 8]

Introduction

would not to the traditions and tones of the receiving nation. His free verse forms - connected as intimately as they are to American speech rhythms, oratorical styles, and colloquial diction - are difficult to reproduce in other languages; in some cases, simply to be able to reproduce his work as something that would be perceived as poetry by readers in the host culture, translators have reformed his free verse style into patterned and rhymed verse. Moreover, each translated version of his work is produced with specific motivations and is read in specific contexts, so certain elements of Whitman's work are emphasized, others silenced. Whitman thus enters Indian culture as a western version of a Hindu prophet, and his work is perceived as endorsing a democracy of the spirit, while his poems are read as a kind of yoga discipline. This version of Whitman is very different from the political revolutionary, often seen as a prophet of socialism, that defined the Whitman who entered the cultures of many European nations in the late nineteenth century. And, in turn, that radical version of Whitman contrasts the politically conservative apologist for American imperialism that was the Whitman often perceived (and resisted) in Latin American cultures. But even such rough generalizations do a disservice to the complex dynamics that generate each national version of Whitman, where he is finally far from a simplistic construct but rather emerges as a figure who incorporates many and often conflicting strands of any given culture's concerns and obsessions. This text contains many possibilities for understanding Whitman, gathered from many different times and places. Out of these possibilities, the reader is invited to construct not only a new understanding of Walt Whitman but also a new understanding of how national literatures might function in a dawning era of internationalism. As this book was being prepared for press, international events continued to remind us how fluid and unstable many national identities are. With the breakup of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, studies of Whitman's international influence echo the increasing fragmentation. What formerly seemed like relatively simple absorptions of Whitman into a single nationality now reveal themselves to be much more complex and multiple patterns of influence. We have tried to trace some of these emerging new patterns, especially in the former country of Yugoslavia, where Whitman's entry had several distinct sources in Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian traditions. With the swift changes in national boundaries and the resurgence of long-repressed ethnic affinities, it becomes clear that any book like this one can only be a snapshot of the current state of an ongoing process. Whitman continues to be an active agent in cultures that are themselves undergoing unpredictable changes. Joking about the bewildering array of photographs of himself that he kept encountering, Whitman once said, "I meet new Walt Whitmans every day. There are a dozen of me afloat.» 4 He would no doubt feel the same way were he able to see the versions of Walt Whitman that continue to emerge in cultures around the world: year after year in country after country, there are new Whitmans afloat.

Introduction

[9]

NOTES

1. Justin Kaplan, ed., Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1049. 2.

Gay Wilson Allen, ed., Walt Whitman Abroad (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,

1955), viii. 3. Huck Gutman, As Others Read Us: International Perspectives on American Literature

(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 16, 11. 4. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (Boston: Small Maynard, 1906), 1: 108.

ABBREVIATIONS

LG:

Walt Whitman, Leaves ofGrass, Comprehensive Reader's Edition, ed. Harold

Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

[ 10]

Introduction

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Whitman in the British Isles "Those blessed gales from the British Isles probably (certainly) saved me.... That emotional, audacious, open-handed, friendly-mouthed, justopportune English action, I say, plucked me like a brand from the burning, and gave me life again.... I do not forget it, and I shall never forget it." I Whitman's effusively favorable view of his standing in Britain has not been fully endorsed by scholars, who point to the distinctly stormy reception accorded Leaves ofGrass by an outraged cultural establishment, from the hostile early Critic review onward (see selection 2). But as the excited response of the elderly Charles Ollier, onetime friend of Shelley, shows (see selection 1), the book-and its author-did appeal immensely to those writers and intellectuals who belonged to the radical subculture of Victorian Britain. 2 To such progressives, his blatant Americanness was important, since it confirmed his status as prophet of the social and political future, but they also saw him as the heir to a distinguished British and European tradition of libertarianism, represented in literature by figures such as Burns, Blake, and Shelley.3 So by 1894 Henry Salt (see selectiQn 21) could construct around Whitman an anthology deliberately meant as a challengingly radical alternative to that influential Victorian fashioner of an Arnoldian "great tradition," The Golden Treasury. Although Palgrave's famous anthology purported to be purely literary and strictly apolitical, Salt set out to expose its covert cultural conservativism by following the example of critics like Edward Dowden, who had discovered, [ 11

I

through reading Whitman, how instinct with political assumptions was the form, as well as the content, of works of literature (see selection 9). Dowden was one of the first critics to use Tocqueville's Democracy in America as a commentary on Leaves ofGrass. In 1885 another radical, the militant democrat and protosocialist Ernest Rhys, set out to save Whitman not only from his enemies but also from his cultivated middle-class friends, in order to make his revolutionary gospel of thoroughgoing egalitarianism known to the masses newly made literate by the education acts of the 1870s. Rhys's letter (selection 13) reminds us that Whitman's initial appeal had been to a small, maverick, middle-class elite of academics, bohemian artists, and men of letters who discovered in his classlessness and sexual frankness, his robust "healthiness" and bold optimism, a relief from the inhibitions and prohibitions of their own sickly culture (see J. A. Symonds's comments in selection 20).4 The activities of this coterie of devotees, which bore several of the hallmarks of a religious cult, are too well known to need further documentation, but it may be worth emphasizing that many of the critical "monologues" printed here are in fact only one side of a complex dialogue. Swinburne, for instance, was already attempting in 1872 (see selection 7) to distance himself from the more uncritically adulatory of Whitman's supporters, an increasingly violent process of self-extrication that culminated in his notorious attack on "Whitmania" in 1887. 5 Even the urbane and measured style of conspicuously accomplished writers like George Saintsbury and Edmund Gosse (see selections 8 and 22) can be regarded as a standing rebuke to the gushing rhapsodies of the faithfu1. 6 But John Addington Symonds makes a challenging point when he claims that established, conventional critical discourse is incapable of dealing adequately with the revolutionary character of this poetry (see selection 20). His call for a new and answerable style of critical discussion is relevant both to Anne Gilchrist's powerfully informal, torrentially impetuous manner of writing (selection 6) and to the later vatic stance of John Cowper Powys (selection 30) or the fluid explorations of D. H. Lawrence (see selection 27 and Studies in Classic American Literature). Bearing Symonds's remark in mind, it is worth noting that the best early British (selection 1) and American (Emerson's 1855 response to Whitman) reactions to Leaves ofGrass came in the unstudied and unbuttoned form of a private letter. It wasn't only members of the intelligentsia who were intensely attracted to Whitman's writings. From 1885 onward a devoted group of skilled workers and lower-middle-class professionals in industrial Bolton met regularly on Monday evenings to study his work. Many of them saw in him a great prophet of the new socialist "religion," and they succeeded in spreading his "gospel" of universal brotherhood to the Labour Church and to the Independent Labour Party, whose revered leader, Keir Hardie, came to regard Whitman as a fellow spirit. Edward Carpenter formed a close association with the circle; two of its members went on pilgrimages to Camden for an audience with Whitman himself; and in turn his beloved, distinguished disciple R. M. Bucke paid the group a visit in 1891. As a last token, at once touching and funny, of Whitman's special affection for the ordi[12]

WHITMAN IN THE BRITISH ISLES

nary ((fellows" of the ((Bolton College," the poet allowed them to stuff the body of his dead pet canary-the caged bird that had comforted him during his last, gloomy years - and carry it back to England with them. In their turn, his Bolton followers remained staunchly true to his memory (see selection 25). ((Whitman Day" remained a labor holiday in that part of Lancashire right down to the 1950s. 7 Whitman's early followers may have congregated in small groups and formed exclusive coteries, but they were nevertheless also usually part of what became a broad movement for social, political, and cultural reform in Victorian Britain. By the turn of the century this movement included radical Liberals, utopian socialists, supporters of Lib-Lab politics, and members of the Independent Labour Party, and activists in these disparate groups were usually exposed to Whitman's influence through the distorting medium of Edward Carpenter's prose and poetry (particularly Towards Democracy, which has been aptly described as ((Whitman and water"). The reaction to Leaves of Grass during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can, in fact, be usefully charted against the background of the initially doubtful and then irresistible rise of broad-based Victorian progressivism and radicalism, culminating, however, in the emergence of a new politics of class conflict. 8 When Leaves of Grass first appeared in 1855, the American republican ((experiment" was viewed with hostile skepticism by conservatives and with considerable misgivings even by liberals (see selection 4). But by the time of the publication in 1860 of Rossetti's influential sanitized selection of Whitman's poetry (see selection 5), Britain had already embarked on a program of social and political reconstruction that was broadly parallel to the American example. Special enthusiasm for Whitman was therefore grounded in a general optimism about ((democracy," although an occasional renegade supporter, such as Roden Noel, could still express reservations about the indiscriminately ((levelling" spirit of the poetry (selection 14). The prevailing climate of opinion partly accounts for the great increase of interest in American literature during the last third of the century, with Emerson and Hawthorne in particular being regarded as major writers. American authors accounted for 10 percent of all titles bought in Britain during the 1880s. The first complete and uncensored British edition of Leaves of Grass appeared in 1881, and twenty editions of Whitman's poetry had been published by 1900. 9 But if there was no longer condescending talk about the naive provincialism and comical brashness of the States, little attempt was made to examine in detail the complex historical background from which Leaves of Grass had actually emerged. (J. A. MacCulloch's comments [selection 23] are an exception.) Instead, Whitman was welcomed as the embodiment of all that was progressive-in his enlightened attitude toward science, religion, sex (see selection 16), and women (see selection 6). As the century drew to its close, however, the confidence of some liberal humanists began to wane, and even previously ardent supporters like Dowden and Robert Louis Stevenson began to revise their views of Whitman's philosophy. Even Henry Bryan Binns's 1905 Life of Walt Whitman, which registered the poet's loose affiliation with socialism, reflected the decline in Whitman's M. Wynn Thomas

[13]

reputation as a social prophet; Binns set out to write an "objective" biography, not a polemical one. Forster's wistful little article (selection 26), addressed to "working men" during a time of bitter labor disputes, is clearly the product of this twilight period of liberalism and can be regarded as a relic of the 1890s, when Whitman's poetry had appealed to a whole generation of young Cambridge intellectuals, including Lowes Dickinson, Roger Fry, G. M. Trevelyan, and G. E. Moore. 10 The decline in Whitman's status as a social prophet may well have helped Basil de Selincourt to concentrate almost exclusively on Whitman's standing as a poet (selection 28). His brilliant, innovative study of the unconventional and much-derided artistry of Leaves ofGrass appeared just as the First World War was finally pulverizing the world of liberalism. A year later Pound's Cathay was published, helping to usher in an aggressive literary modernism whose British followers and opponents alike were mostly to treat Whitman as a mere irrelevance. Those late-nineteenth-century texts that testify to Whitman's power as a great liberator, and even as a savior, are particularly fascinating cultural documents precisely because they now seem so historically remote; once more, the most striking of them comes in the form of a series of letters sent by Anne Gilchrist to Rossetti (see selection 6). Her startlingly unguarded response may in many respects repel rather than inspire modern feminists, but taken in its totality it provides a quite fearsome insight into the plight of Victorian women. In particular, Gilchrist defends Whitman's treatment of sexuality with a fiercely passionate intelligence completely unmatched elsewhere in all the Victorian verbiage about his "obscenity." By comparison, Pauline Roose's discussion of Whitman as a "childpoet" may at first seem coyly sentimental and cutely maternal (selection 18). But it has its own subversive aspects, since it adroitly avoids passing conventional moral judgment on the sexual morality of the poetry by radically changing the terms of the discussion and incidentally points the way forward to later psychoanalytic readings of Whitman's "infantilism" and polymorphous-perverse tendencies. Two other daring explorers of the sexual content of the poetry returned with findings very different from those of Gilchrist and Roose. Havelock Ellis and Symonds both strongly suspected that Whitman's secret erotic preference was for the homophile relationships celebrated so ambiguously in the Calamus sequence (see selections 16 and 20). Like his friend Edward Carpenter, Ellis exulted in this discovery, but Symonds's anguished uncertainty about both Whitman's real sexual orientation and Symonds's own attitude toward homosexuality permeates his writing. l l Yet although these Britons were among the first to crack Whitman's sexual code, he seems never to have assumed the kind of importance in gay men's circles in Britain that he has in the culture of American gays.12 Both for its quantity and for its quality, then, the best of British reactions to Leaves of Grass deserved Whitman's gratitude. "Those blessed gales from the British Islands" he called the support he had received, before lapsing into a description of it as "a just-opportune English action." He was right the first time, since it was not only England but each of the countries of the British Isles that played its part in establishing Whitman's reputation. Wales did least, because its [14]

WHITMAN IN THE BRITISH ISLES

culture, strongly nonconformist, continued to exist mainly in the Welsh language, but it nevertheless contributed through the Anglo-Welshman Ernest Rhys and later through the adopted Welshman John Cowper Powys.13 P. Mansell Jones's comparison ofWhitman to the great Belgian poet Verhaeren (selection 29) was an interesting cultural by-product of Lloyd George's recruitment appeal to his countrymen to remember that other small beleaguered European country, gallant little Belgium. Yet during the First World War, T. E. Nicholas (Niclas y Glais) used a crude form of free verse modeled on Whitman's example to produce a savage attack in Welsh on the carnage which capitalism was sponsoring. As for Scotland, the interest it showed in Whitman was quite remarkable and can perhaps best be attributed both to the pronounced liberal and libertarian strain in the culture since the period of the Scottish enlightenment and to a degree of sympathetic fellow-feeling by the Scots for another non-English but English-speaking nation. No fewer than three books on Whitman were published in Scotland during his lifetime, including John Robertson's incisively intelligent polemical pamphlet (selection 11).14 Leading Scottish writers from Robert Louis Stevenson to the redoubtable Hugh MacDiarmid have acknowledged the significant debt they've owed to Whitman's example, and since the Second World War David Daiches has been an accomplished and prolific interpreter of his poetry (selection 35).15 It was in Ireland, though, that Whitman had the greatest impact of all, as W. B. Yeats's letter best illustrates (selection 19). Dowden was, of course, an Anglo-Irishman and the center of a Whitman circle well known to the poet himself. Whitman's deepest influence on Irish literature was, however, transmitted by different means, through figures who played a key part at different stages in the Irish Renaissance. 16 These included Standish O'Grady, AE (George Russell), Sean O'Casey, and Frank O'Connor. 17 Even Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, registered Whitman's presence as a force in modern Irish culture,18 and the letters written by Yeats in his youth show how he looked to Whitman to provide a model and an inspiration for the development of an independent, indigenous Irish literature in English. 19 Padraic Colum anticipated Lawrence in his sensitive discussion of Whitman's work as, both in form and content, a poetry of "Becoming" (see selection 31).20 Nor was Whitman's influence confined to the writers. The freedom fighter James Connolly took Whitman's «Defiant Deed" as the text of his address to his followers during the Easter Rising in 1916, and his friend, the famous labor leader James Larkin, claimed his love of humanity derived from the writings of Thoreau, Emerson, and «the greatest man of all next to Whitman - Mark Twain." 21 The warmth of Irish attachment to Whitman continues to be evident in the panache of the recent studies by Denis Donoghue (selection 38), while the comments of the contemporary Ulster poet Tom Paulin (selection 43) represent a fascinating attempt, reminiscent of Henry Salt's a century ago, to link Whitman to a native British republican tradition. What, though, of Whitman's creative influence on the writers of the British Isles? While poets as diverse as Hopkins (selection 10), Wilde, Isaac Rosenberg, and Dylan Thomas have been fascinated by his work,22 it seems that W. H. Auden M. Wynn Thomas

[15]

(see selection 36) and Charles Tomlinson are pretty close to the mark when they single out Lawrence as the sole example of a major writer whose imagination was certainly informed, and had perhaps been transformed, by Whitman's poetry.23 Lawrence's resultant attitude toward the American was so prickly and so chronically ambivalent that between 1913 and 1923 he made at least three separate and significantly different attempts to write him out of his system. The last two essays are already very well known, while the first must await publication by Cambridge University Press, but Lawrence's marvelously suggestive letter to Henry Savage deserves more attention, since everything he says later is there in embryo (selection 27).24 Tomlinson's recent demonstration of the extent of Whitman's influence on Ivor Gurney is revealing (selection 42), but in spite of his sensitive tribute to Whitman in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and other poems (selection 40),25 Tomlinson offers in his own work a perfect example of the preference most important modern British poets have shown, whenever they have turned to American literature, for Pound and his fellow-modernists over Whitman. At the same time, those writing determinedly in the British grain have-with the occasional memorable exception such as Geoffrey Grigson (selection 39) -regarded Whitman as the epitome of all that is foreign (and wrong) in American writing. The case with modern British composers has been intriguingly different, as the novelist Anthony Burgess points out (selection 37). In retrospect, Lawrence's essay in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) can be seen to have been the culmination of almost seventy years of intense and frequently controversial discussion by British writers and critics of Leaves ofGrass and its author. For almost half a century thereafter, however, Whitman was virtually ignored. Hugh l'Anson Faussett's comments (selection 32) illuminate the situation during the thirties and remind us that Whitman's philosophy of a kind of corporate or cooperative individualism was unconvincing and unsympathetic to those who believed in the need for collectivist solutions to modern social problems. Published to mark the fiftieth anniversary ofWhitman's death in 1942, Faussett's book was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, where the reviewer understandably warmed to those aspects of Whitman that had left Faussett cold - his advocacy of a personal freedom that was the antithesis of totalitarianism in both its Fascist and its Communist forms. 26 A renewed interest in democracy not only as a political system but also as a human ideal is evident in the elderly J. Middleton Murry's postwar, and Cold War, study (selection 34). In 1955 the Times Literary Supplement welcomed Gay Wilson Allen's The Solitary Singer: "a good biography of Whitman is particularly needed in this country, for most of us are only lightly acquainted with the social and political background of the America of his day." 27 Since then the growth of American Studies in British universities has done much to improve the situation, and most of the discussion of Whitman over the past thirty years has taken place within that specialized professional CO!1text. The evident strengths of such a delimiting approach have, however, their corresponding weaknesses, which is why the cross-cultural comparisons effortlessly made by an elegantly perceptive nonacademic like V. S. Pritchett [ 16]

WH I TMAN IN TH E B RI TI S HIS LES

and a gifted general practitioner like John Bayley are such vitally important correctives (selections 33 and 41). After all, Whitman's appeal in Britain had, from the very first, extended well beyond the academy and has frequently been deliciously unpredictable. 28

NOTES

1. Floyd Stovall, ed., Prose Works 1892 (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 2: 699 -700. Whitman is referring specifically to the kindness of Rossetti and his friends who

supported him through subscriptions in 1875 and 1876. 2. For further information about Charles allier, see M. Wynn Thomas, "(A New World of Thought': Whitman's Early Reception in England," Walt Whitman Review 27 (June 1981): 74-78. This article also argues the case for identifying Edmund allier as the probable author of The Leader review (selection 3). 3. See, for instance, Swinburne's discussion of Whitman in William Blake: A Critical Essay (London: John Camden Hotten, 1868). 4. Note, for instance, the comment of J. A. MacCulloch in Westminster Review (July-December 1899): 550: "He is in marked contrast to Clough and Arnold, poets of despair, of those moods of the soul which are suited to so many in our time." The standard study ofWhitman's early admirers is still Harold Blodgett, Walt Whitman in England (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1934; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1973). His succinct summary of the nineteenth-century British reaction is worth recording: "As the British reader turned the pages [of Leaves of Grass], he was confronted, according to his temperament, by Whitman the magnetic lover and glorifier of life, Whitman the archetype of the American democrat, Whitman the great prophet of the world's hope, Whitman the innovating artist, or Whitman the vulgar and ignorant charlatan" (216). See also the section on Britain in Gay Wilson Allen, The New Walt Whitman Handbook (New York: New York University Press, 1975), and the section on Leaves of Grass in Benjamin Lease, AngloAmerican Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 229-254. 5. On the vexed question of Swinburne's "defection'" see Blodgett, Walt Whitman, chapter 7; Georges Lafourcade, "Swinburne and Walt Whitman," Modern Language Review 22 (1927): 84-86; W. B. Cairns, "Swinburne's View of Whitman," American Literature 3 (May 1931): 125-135; Clyde K. Hyder, "Swinburne's (Changes of Aspect' and Short Notes," PMLA 58 (March 1943): 241; William J. Gaede, "Swinburne and the Whitmaniacs," Victorian Newsletter 33 (1968): 16-21. 6. For Gosse, see Robert L. Peters, "Edmund Gosse's Two Whitmans," Walt Whitman

Review 11 (1965): 19-21. 7. The fullest account of the Bolton group is to be found in Paul Salvesen, Loving Com-

rades: Lancashire's Links to Walt Whitman (a pamphlet published by the author in conjunc-

tion with the Bolton Branch of the Workers' Educational Association, 1984); the poem by Hawkins included here is reprinted from page 6 of Salvesen's book. See also Blodgett, Walt Whitman, chapter 12. 8. For this interpretation and related material, I am deeply indebted to R. H. Jellema's M. Wynn Thomas

[17]

unpublished doctoral dissertation, "Victorian Critics and the Orientation of American Literature' with Special Reference to the Reception ofWalt Whitman and Henry James" (University of Edinburgh, 1962-1963). 9. See Clarence Gohdes, American Literature in Nineteenth Century England (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1944). He also makes the point that after the Franco-Prussian War, Britain increasingly looked on America as an ally against the rising European superpower of Germany. 10. For an analysis of Binns's biography, see Jerome Loving, "The Binns Biography," in Ed Folsom, ed., Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994), 10-18. I am grateful to my friend, Tony Brown, UCNW, Bangor, for drawing Forster's article to my attention. Whitman's influence on the Cambridge liberals, and thereby eventually on the Bloomsbury group, is discussed by Howard Howarth, "Whitman and the English Writers," in Lister F. Zimmerman and Winston Weathers, eds., Papers on Walt Whitman (Tulsa, Oklahoma: University of Tulsa, 1970),6-25. 11. For Carpenter, see A. D. Brown, ed., Edward Carpenter and Late Victorian Radicalism (London: Frank Cass, 1990). 12. For the history of gay culture in Britain and its representation in literature, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Pr~ss, 1985). 13. For Rhys, see M. Wynn Thomas, "Walt Whitman's Welsh Connection: Ernest Rhys," Anglo-Welsh Review 82 (1986): 77-85; J. Kimberley Roberts, Ernest Rhys (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1983). Welsh-language writers influenced by Whitman are discussed in M. Wynn Thomas, "From Walt to Waldo: Whitman's Welsh Admirers," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 10 (Fall 1992): 61-73. 14. The Scottish context is well discussed by Jellema, "Victorian Critics." Allen, however, believes that "Scotland was slow in accepting Whitman" (Handbook, 275). The importance of Burns to Whitman is discussed in Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 208-213. 15. Hugh MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 188-189. 16. See Terence Diggory, Yeats and American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Herbert Howarth, "Whitman among the Irish," London Magazine (1960): 48-55; James E. Quinn, "Yeats and Whitman, 1887-1925," Walt Whitman Review 20 (1974): 106-109· 17. See Standish O'Grady, "Walt Whitman, the Poet of Joy," Gentleman's Magazine 15 (n.s.) (London, 1875): 704-716. Patrick Kavanagh's refreshingly irreverent reaction to AE)s solemn enthusiasm for Whitman is worth recalling: "I was a peasant and a peasant is a narrow surveyor of generous hearts. He read me Whitman, .of whom he was very fond, and also Emerson. I didn't like Whitman and said so. I always thought him a writer who tried to bully his way to prophecy" (The Green Fool [London: Martin, Brian & O'Keefe, 1971], 301). 18. Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 263, 551. See also Don Summerhayes, "Joyce's Ulysses and Whitman's 'Self,'" Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 4

(1963): 216- 224. 19. Yeats)s comments on Whitman in his letters should be read in conjunction with the [18 J

WHITMAN IN THE BRITISH ISLES

very different opinion he expressed in A Vision, Book One, phase six (London: Macmillan, 1978), 113-114. 20. See D. H. Lawrence's introduction to the American edition of New Poems, in Anthony Beal, ed., D. H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism (London: Heinemann, 1964), 84-89· 21. Robert Flack, "A Note on Whitman in Ireland," Walt Whitman Review 21 (1975): 160-162. 22. Oscar Wilde, "The Gospel According to Walt Whitman," Pall Mall Gazette 49 (London, January 25, 1889), 3. Rosenberg expresses a touching admiration for Drum- Taps in his wartime letters (see G. Bottomley and D. Harding, eds., The Collected Works ofIsaac Rosenberg [London: Chatto and Windus, 1937],348,358). More about Hopkins's interest can be

found in Jerry A. Herndon, "Hopkins and Whitman," Walt Whitman Review 24 (1978): 161-162. Whitman's portrait had a place of honor on the wall of the Laugharne boathouse where Dylan Thomas worked. His mentions of Whitman occur in numbers 117 and 145 of Paul Ferris, ed., The Collected Letters (London: Dent, 1985). For Whitman's influence on Thomas, see Stanley Friedman, "Whitman and Laugharne," Anglo-Welsh Review 18 (1969): 81; Paul J. Ferlazzo, "Dylan Thomas and Walt Whitman: Birth, Death and Time," Walt Whitman Review 23 (1977): 136-141; James E. Miller, Jr., Karl Shapiro, and Bernice Slote, Start with the Sun (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 196o). Other interesting material on Whitman's connection with British writers includes John M. Ditsky, "Whitman-

Tennyson Correspondence: A Summary and Commentary," Walt Whitman Review 18 (1972): 75-82; George Ray Eliott, "Browning's Whitmanism," Sewanee Review 37 (April 1929): 164-171; W. E. Fredeman, "Whitman and William Morris," Victorian Poetry 15 (Autumn/Winter 1977); George Soule, "Rupert Brooke and Whitman," Little Review (April 1914): 15-16. 23. For the complicated history of Lawrence's treatment of Whitman, see George Y. Trail's comprehensive essay, "Lawrence's Whitman," D. H. Lawrence Review 14, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 172-190; Richard Swigg, Lawrence, Hardy and American Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1977); R. W. French, "Whitman and the Poetics of Lawrence," in Jeffrey Meyers, ed., D. H. Lawrence and Tradition (Amherst: University of Amherst Press, 1985), 91-114; Rosemarie Arbour, "'Lilacs' and 'Sorrow': Whitman's Effect on the Early Poems ofD. H. Lawrence," Walt Whitman Review 24 (1978): 17-21. 24. I am very grateful to my friend and colleague John Worthen, one of the senior editors of the Cambridge University Press edition of Lawrence's works, for his attempt, though unsuccessful, to obtain permission for me to include Lawrence's unpublished essay in this collection. A summary (already out of date) of the various essays on Whitman written by Lawrence can be found in Warren Roberts, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2d ed., 1982). Even more succinct than Lawrence's remarks in the letter is his poem "Retort to Whitman": "And whoever walks a mile full of false sympathy / walks to the funeral of the whole human race" (V. de Sola Pinto and W. Roberts, eds., The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence [London: Heinemann, 1967], 2: 633). 25. See also "A Garland for Thomas Eakins," Selected Poems, 1951-1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 76, and "Hero Sandwiches," Notes from New York (Oxford: OxM. Wynn Thomas

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ford University Press, 1984), 23. Tomlinson first discovered Pound when he went up to Cambridge in 1945, and what Pound "had to teach survived the only other reading of an American that I accomplished in bulk at Cambridge. This was Whitman. He, along with Nietzsche, formed the style of the earliest unfortunate poems that I wrote on going down in 1948" (Some Americans: A Personal Record [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981],3). 26. "Whitman: Poet of Democracy," Times Literary Supplement, Saturday, March 14, 1942, 126; also the lead article, "Masses or Men," 127. 27. TLS, Friday, June 10, 1955, 316.

28. Douglas Grant's remark should always be borne in mind: "The history of Whit-

man's reception in England [sic] ... is almost as important to an understanding of English taste and sensibility as it is to the appraisal of the poet, and may help to show why we should be unwise to neglect American literature, or to allow it to be always treated as if it existed on its own" ("Walt Whitman and His English Admirers," University of Leeds inaugural lecture, University of Leeds Press, 1962; reprinted in Purpose and Place [London: Macmillan, 1965]).

1. CHARLES OLLIER

Letter to Leigh Hunt, February 19, 1856 [Whitman] says he is «one of the roughs," a «kosmos" etc; and in another part of his poem, he tells us his age & that he is six feet high. ((Well!" say you, «What care I? Who the deuce is Walt. Whitman?" Let me be the first to tell you. Walt. is an American - a sensualist - a «rough" - a «rowdy" - a «kosmos" (this is odd) - a poet - a humanist - an egotist - a transcendentalist, and a philosopher. Except the first book ever written (and who can tell what that was?) Walt. has given to the world the most original book ever composed. Other writers are derivations from their predecessors. Chaucer had his precursors; so had Spenser; so had Shakespeare; so Milton, and the rest. But Walt. is himself alone: himself in his mode of utterance, in his all-embracing philosophy, in his imagery, his description, his word-craft, and in every thing else. 0 the delight of getting into a new intellectual region! Walt's book, just arrived from New York, is a quarto with very full pages, published without any publisher's name or any author's; but he faces the title with what our ancestors used to call the writer's true effigies, as much as to say «Here is the man who wrote this work. How do you like me? What do you think of me?" And there he stands in his shirt sleeves and bare neck and rough beard. He lets out his name in the course of the poem. Walter Whitman is very fleshly as well as intellectual; and is too «particular" in the former respect. I wish it were not so. But one must be careful how one judges [ 20]

W HIT MAN IN THE B R I TIS HIS L E S

so large a mind. Perhaps he finds on that "side of things" as much to love and to wonder at as any other; and not only in that, but in "things evil," the soul of goodness in which he "observingly distils out." He s~ys he is "the poet of the body, and the poet of the soul: the poet of goodness, and the poet of wickedness." And wonderfully does he work out his purpose, which appears to be the universal reconcilement of things. He is obscure - he is occasionally slangy and vulgar with his Yankeeisms and plain-speaking; and his mysticism is too frequent. But his pages open a new world of thought. He is profound and far-seeing: profound because he digs to the roots of things; & far-seeing because he looks at space. He is not a driveller, like Wordsworth who is a flat variation of Cowper. He lies at the feet of no man; but stands like a great statue on a mountain-top seen from afar or like that lonely warder on the summit of one of the towers in Claude's Enchanted Castle, whom the artist has posted there forever, grasping his spear, and forever gazing over the wide, weltering waste of water. Walt. is sure to be laughed at and derided. But he evidently does not write for tavern-wits, though he may be one of them-a rake, a rough, a rowdy. In his universal love (for it is nothing short of that) of his fellow-men, he can find the friendliest words for drunkards, prostitutes & fools. He scans with a learned eye the mysteries of our nature, & cannot detect anything to hate. I can already understand half his book, and hope some day to comprehend the remainder. Very very few things in the English language are so fine-so strong-so juicy-so marrowy-so eloquent as some of Walt's passages. He will not tolerate pattern-writing (like that of Longfellow) or transmitted phrases; but is ever fresh and surprising. His poem is not in rhyme nor in blank verse; but in what one of his Yankee reviewers calls "excited prose." He divides his paragraphs like stanzas: he has long & short lines: and sometimes lines so long as to run three or four times across the page. I cannot yet find out his music though I believe him to be musical for he talks with rapture of music, classical & otherwise. Plenty of ridicule awaits him, and he is the very man to bear it, for he is himself a droll; and he is a weeper too, making his reader weep with him whenever he pleases. His main endeavour, nevertheless, is to elevate his reader with the grandeur of his philosophy and his conceptions and to make the world happier than it is. Walt. is a great poet - almost a prophet. His poem is about nothing, because it is about everything. Manuscript in British Museum.

2. ANONYMOUS REVIEW

We had ceased, we imagined, to be surprised at anything that America could produce. We had become stoically indifferent to her Woolly Horses, her Mermaids, her Sea Serpents, her Barnums, and her Fanny Ferns; but the last monstrous importation from Brooklyn, New York, has scattered our indifference to Anonymous Review

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the winds. Here is a thin quarto volume without an author's name on the titlepage; but to atone for which we have a portrait engraved on steel of the notorious individual who is the poet presumptive. This portrait expresses all the features of the hard democrat, and none of the flexile delicacy of the civilized poet. The damaged hat, the rough beard, the naked throat, the shirt exposed to the waist, are each and all presented to show that the man to whom those articles belong scorns the delicate arts of civilisation. The man is the true impersonation of the bookrough, uncouth, vulgar. It was by the merest accident that we discovered the name of this erratic and newest wonder: at page 29 we find that he isWalt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a Kosmos, Disorderly, fleshly and sensual. The words, "an American" are a surplusage, "one of the roughs" too painfully apparent; but what is intended to be conveyed by a "Kosmos" we cannot tell, unless it means a man who thinks that the fine essence of poetry consists in writing a book which an American reviewer is compelled to declare is "not to be read aloud to a mixed audience." We should have passed over this book, Leaves ofGrass, with indignant contempt, had not some few Transatlantic critics attempted to "fix" this Walt Whitman as the poet who shall give a new and independent literature to America-who shall form a race of poets as Banquo's issue formed a line of kings. Is it possible that the most prudish nation in the world will adopt a poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils? We hope not; and yet there is a probability, and we will show why, that this Walt Whitman will not meet with the stern rebuke which he so richly deserves. America has felt, oftener perhaps than we have declared, that she has no national poet-that each one of her children of song has relied too much on European inspiration, and clung too fervently to the old conventionalities. It is therefore not unlikely that she may believe in the dawn of a thoroughly original literature, now there has arisen a man who scorns the hellenic deities, who has no belief in, perhaps because he has no knowledge of, Homer and Shakespeare; who relies on his own rugged nature, and trusts to his own rugged language, being himself what he shows in his poems. Once transfix him as the genesis of a new era, and the manner of the man may be forgiven or forgotten. But what claims has this Walt Whitman to be thus considered, or to be considered a poet at all? We grant freely enough that he has a strong relish for nature and freedom, just as an animal has; nay, further, that his crude mind is capable of appreciating some of nature's beauties; but it by no means follows that, because nature is excellent, therefore art is contemptible. Walt Whitman is as unacquainted with art, as a hog is with mathematics. His poemswe must call them so for convenience-twelve in number, are innocent of rhythm, and resemble nothing so much as the war-cry of the Red Indians. Indeed, Walt Whitman has had near and ample opportunities of studying the vociferation of a few amiable savages. Or rather perhaps, this Walt Whitman reminds us of

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Caliban flinging down his logs, and setting himself to write a poem. In fact Caliban, and not Walt Whitman, might have written this: I too am not a bit tamed-I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Is this man with the «barbaric yawp" to push Longfellow into the shade, and he meanwhile to stand and «make mouths" at the sun? The chance of this might be formidable were it not ridiculous. That object or that actwhich most develops the ridiculous element carries in its bosom the seeds of decay, and is wholly powerless to trample out of God's universe one spark of the beautiful. We do not, then, fear this Walt Whitman, who gives us slang in the place of melody, and rowdyism in the place of regularity. The depth of his indecencies will be the grave of his fame, or ought to be if all proper feeling is not extinct. The very nature of this man's compositions excludes us from proving by extracts the truth of our remarks; but we, who are not prudish, emphatically declare that the man who wrote page 79 of the Leaves of Grass deserves nothing so richly as the public executioner's whip. Walt Whitman libels the highest type of humanity, and calls his free speech the true utterance of a man: we, who may have been misdirected by civilisation, call it the expression of a beast . .. Critic 15 (April 1, 1856): 170-171.

3.

EDMUND OLLIER (?)

((Transatlantic Latter-Day Poetry" «Latter-day poetry" in America is of a very different character from the same manifestation in the old country. Here, it is occupied for the most part with dreams of the middle ages, of the old knightly and religious times: in America, it is employed chiefly with the present, except when it travels out into the undiscovered future. Here, our latter-day poets are apt to whine over the times, as if Heaven were perpetually betraying the earth with a show of progress that is in fact retrogression, like the backward advance of crabs: there, the minstrels of the stars and stripes blow a loud note of exultation before the grand new epoch, and think the Greeks and Romans, the early Oriental races, and the altar men of the middle centuries, of small account before the outward tramping of these present generations. Of this latter sect is a certain phenomenon who has recently started up in Brooklyn, New York-one Walt Whitman, author of «Leaves of Grass," who has been received by a section of his countrymen as a sort of prophet, and by Englishmen as a kind of fool. For ourselves, we are not disposed to accept him as the one,

Edmund OIlier (?)

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having less faith in latter-day prophets than in latter-day poets; but assuredly we cannot regard him as the other. Walt is one of the most amazing, one of the most startling, one of the most perplexing, creations of the modern American mind; but he is no fool, though abundantly eccentric, nor is his book mere food for laughter, though undoubtedly containing much that may most easily and fairly be turned into ridicule. The singularity of the author's mind - his utter disregard of ordinary forms and modes-appears in the very title-page and frontispiece of his work. Not only is there no author's name (which in itself would not be singular), but there is no publisher's name-that of the English bookseller being a London addition. Fronting the title is the portrait of a bearded gentleman in his shirt-sleeves and a Spanish hat, with an all-pervading atmosphere of Yankee-doodle about him; but again there is no patronymic, and we can only infer that this roystering blade is the author of the book. Then follows a long prose treatise by way of Preface (and here once more the anonymous system is carried out, the treatise having no heading whatever); and after that we have the poem, in the course of which, a short autobiographical discourse reveals to us the name of the author.... The poem is written in wild, irregular, unrhymed, almost unmetrical "lengths," like the measured prose of Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, or of some of the Oriental writings. The external form, therefore, is startling, and by no means seductive, to English ears, accustomed to the sumptuous music of ordinary metres; and the central principle of the poem is equally staggering. It seems to resolve itself into an all-attracting egotism - an eternal presence of the individual soul of Walt Whitman in all things, yet in such wise that this one soul shall be presented as a type of all human souls whatsoever. He goes forth into the world, this rough, devil-may-care Yankee; passionately identifies himself with all forms of being, sentient or inanimate; sympathizes deeply with humanity; riots with a kind of Bacchanal fury in the force and fervour of his own sensations; will not have the most vicious or abandoned shut out from final comfort and reconciliation; is delighted with Broadway, New York, and equally in love with the desolate backwoods, and the long stretch of the uninhabited prairie, where the wild beasts wallow in the reeds, and the wilder birds start upwards from their nests among the grass; perceives a divine mystery wherever his feet conduct or his thoughts transport him; and beholds all beings tending towards the central and sovereign Me. Such, as we conceive, is the key to this strange, grotesque, and bewildering book; yet we are far from saying that the key will unlock all the quirks and oddities of the volume. Much remains of which we confess we can make nothing; much that seems to us purely fantastical and preposterous; much that appears to our muddy vision gratuitously prosaic, needlessly plain-speaking, disgusting without purpose, and singular without result. There are so many evidences of a noble soul in Whitman's pages that we regret these aberrations, which only have the effect of discrediting what is genuine by the show of something false; and especially do we deplore the unnecessary openness with which Walt reveals to us matters which ought rather to remain in a sacred silence. It is good not to be [24]

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ashamed of Nature; it is good to have an all-inclusive charity; but it is also good, sometimes, to leave the veil across the Temple. The Leader (June 7, 1856): 547.

4.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Letter to W. D. O'Connor, September 16,1866 As to the general question of Mr. Walt Whitman's poetical achievement, you will think that it savours of our decrepit old Europe when I add that while you think it is his highest merit that he is so unlike anyone else, to me this seems to be his demerit; no one can afford in literature to trade merely on his own bottom and to take no account of what the other ages and nations have acquired: a great original literature America will never get in this way, and her intellect must inevitably consent to come, in a considerable measure, into the European movement. That she may do this and yet be an independent intellectual power, not merely as you sayan intellectual colony of Europe, I cannot doubt; and it is on her doing this, and not on her displaying an eccentric and violent originality that wise Americans should in my opinion set their desires. Bliss Perry, Walt Whitman: His Life and Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 177-179.

5.

WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI

Introduction, Poems by Walt Whitman [Leaves of Grass], then, taken as a whole, is the poem both of Personality and Democracy; and, it may be added, ofAmerican nationalism. It is par excellence the modern poem. It is distinguished also by this peculiarity-that in it the most literal view of things is continually merging into the most rhapsodic or passionately abstract. Picturesqueness it has, but mostly of a somewhat patriarchal kind, not deriving from the "word-painting" of the litterateur; a certain echo of the old Hebrew poetry may even be caught in it, extra-modern though it is. Another most prominent and pervading quality of the book is the exuberant physique of the author. The conceptions are throughout those of a man in robust health, and might alter much under different conditions. Further, there is a strong tone of paradox in Whitman's writings. He is both a realist and an optimist in extreme measure: he contemplates evil as in some sense not existing, or if existing, then as being of as much importance as anything William Michael Rossetti

[25]

else. Not that he is a materialist; on the contrary, he is a most strenuous assertor of the soul, and, with the soul, of the body as its infallible associate and vehicle in the present frame of things. Neither does he drift into fatalism or indifferentism; the energy of his temperament, and ever-fresh sympathy with national and other developments, being an effectual bar to this. The paradoxical element of the poems is such that one may sometimes find them in conflict with what has preceded, and would not be much surprised if they said at any moment the reverse of whatever they do say. This is mainly due to the multiplicity of the aspects of things, and to the immense width of relation in which Whitman stands to all sorts and all aspects of them. But the greatest of this poet's distinctions is his absolute and entire originality. He may be termed formless by those who, not without much reason to show for themselves, are wedded to the established forms and ratified sentiments of poetic art; but it seems reasonable to enlarge the canon till it includes so great and startling a genius, rather than to draw it close and exclude him. His work is practically certaIn to stand as archetypal for many' future poetic efforts-so great is his power as an originator, so fervid his initiative. It forms incomparably the largest performance of our period in poetry. Victor Hugo's Legende des Siecles alone might be named with it for largeness, and even that with much less of a new starting-point in conception and treatment. Whitman breaks with all precedent. To what he himself perceives and knows he has a personal relation of the intensest kind: to anything in the way of prescription, no relation at all. But he is saved from isolation by the depth of his Americanism; with the movement of his predominant nation he is moved. His comprehension, energy and tenderness, are all extreme, and all inspired by actualities. And, as for poetic genius, those who, without being ready to concede that faculty to Whitman, confess his iconoclastic boldness and his Titanic power of temperament, working in the sphere of poetry, do in effect confess his genius as well.... Besides originality and daring, which have already been insisted upon, width and intensity are leading characteristics of his writings - width both of subjectmatter and of comprehension, intensity of self-absorption into what the poet contemplates and expresses. He scans and presents an enormous panorama, unrolled before him as from a mountain-top; and yet whatever most large or most minute or casual thing his eye glances upon, that he enters into with a depth of affection which identifies him with it for the time, be the object what it may. There is a singular interchange also of actuality and of ideal substratum and suggestion. While he sees men, with even abnormal exactness and sympathy, as men, he sees them also "as trees walking," and admits us to perceive that the whole show is in a measure spectral and unsubstantial, and the mask of a larger and profounder reality beneath it, of which it is giving perpetual intimations and auguries. He is the poet indeed of literality, full of indirections as well as directness, and of readings between the lines. Ifhe is the "cutest of Yankees," he is also as truly an enthusiast as any the most typical poet. All his faculties and performance glow into a white heat of brotherliness; and there is a poignancy both of tenderness and of beauty [26]

WHITMAN IN THE BRITISH ISLES

about his finer works which discriminates them quite as much as their modernness, audacity, or any other exceptional point.... There is a singular and impressive intuition or revelation of Swedenborg's; that the whole ofheaven is in the form of one man, and the separate societies of heaven in the forms of the several parts of man. In a large sense, the general drift ofWhitman's writings, even down to the passages which read as most bluntly physical, bear a striking correspondence or analogy to this dogma. He takes man, and every organism and faculty of man, as the unit - the datum - from which all that we know, discern, and speculate, of abstract and supersensual, as well as of concrete and sensual, has to be computed. He knows of nothing nobler than that unit man; but, knowing that, he can use it for any multiple, and for any dynamical extension or recast. Let us next obtain some idea of what this most remarkable poet - the founder of American poetry rightly to be so called, and the most sonorous poetic voice of the tangibilities of actual and prospective democracy - is in his proper life and person.... A few words must be added as to the indecencies scattered through Whitman's writings. Indecencies or improprieties - or, still better, deforming cruditiesthey may rightly be termed; to call them immoralities would be going too far. Whitman finds himself, and other men and women, to be a compound of soul and body; he finds that body plays an extremely prominent and determining part in whatever he and other mundane dwellers have cognizance of; he perceives this to be the necessary condition of things, and therefore, as he fully and openly accepts it, the right condition; and he knows of no reason why what is universally seen and known, necessary and right, should not also be allowed and proclaimed in speech. That such a view of the matter is entitled to a great deal of weight, and at any rate to candid consideration and construction, appears to me not to admit of a doubt; neither is it dubious that the contrary view, the only view which a mealy-mouthed British nineteenth century admits as endurable, amounts to the condemnation of nearly every great or eminent literary work of past time, whatever the century it belongs to, the country it comes from, the department of writing it illustrates, or the degree or sort of merit it possesses. (London: John Camden Hotten, 1868), 5-7, 9-11, 20-21.

6.

ANNE GILCHRIST

An Englishwoman's Estimate of Walt Whitman I had not dreamed that words could cease to be words, and become electric streams like these. I do assure you that, strong as I am, I feel sometimes as if I had not bodily strength to read many of these poems. In the series headed "Calamus," Anne Gilchrist

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for instance, in some of the "Songs of Parting," the "Voice out of the Sea," the poem beginning "Tears, tears," etc., there is such a weight of emotion, such a tension of the heart, that mine refuses to beat under it - stands quite still- and I am obliged to lay the book down for a while. Or again, the piece called "Walt Whitman," and one or two others of that type, I am as one hurried through stormy seas, over high mountains, dazed with sunlight, stunned with a crowd and tumult of faces and voices, till I am breathless, bewildered, half-dead. Then come parts and whole poems in which there is such calm wisdom and strength of thought, such a cheerful breadth of sunshine, that the soul bathes in them renewed and strengthened. Living impulses flow out of these that make me exult in life, yet look longingly towards "the superb vistas of Death." Those who admire this poem, and do not care for that, and talk of formlessness, absence of metre, and so forth, are quite as far from any genuine recognition of Walt Whitman as his bitter detractors. Not, of course, that all the pieces are equal in power and beauty, but that all are vital; they grew - they were not made. We criticise a palace or a cathedral; but what is the good of criticising a forest? ... Nor do I sympathize with those who grumble at the unexpected words that turn up now and then. A quarrel with words is always, more or less, a quarrel with meanings; and here we are to be as genial and as wide as nature, and quarrel with nothing. If the thing a word stands for exists by divine appointment (and what does not so exist?) the word need never be ashamed of itself; the shorter and more direct, the better. It is a gain to make friends with it, and see it in good company. Here, at all events, "poetic diction" would not serve - not pretty, soft, colourless words, laid by in lavender for the special uses of poetry, that have had none of the wear and tear of daily life; but such as have stood most, as tell of human heartbeats; as fit closest to the sense, and have taken deep hues of association from the varied experiences of life-those are the words wanted here. We only ask to seize and be seized swiftly, overmasteringly, by the great meanings. We see with the eyes of the soul, listen with the ears of the soul; the poor old words that have served so many generations for purposes, good, bad, and indifferent, and become warped and blurred in the process, grow young again, regenerate, translucent. It is not mere delight they give us- that the "sweet singers," with their subtly wrought gifts, their mellifluous speech, can give too in their degree; it is such life and health as enable us to pluck delights for ourselves out of every hour of the day, and taste the sunshine that ripened the corn in the crust we eat - I often seem to myself to do that.... You argued rightly that my confidence would not be betrayed by any of the poems in this book. None of them troubled me even for a moment; because I saw at a glance that it was not, as men had supposed, the heights brought down to the depths, but the depths lifted up level with the sunlit heights, that they might become clear and sunlit too. Always, for a woman, a veil .woven out of her own soul- never touched upon even, with a rough hand, by this poet. But, for a man, a daring, fearless pride in himself, not a mock-modesty woven out of delusions-

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a very proper imitation of a woman's. Do they not see that this fearful pride, this complete acceptance of themselves, is needful for her pride, her justification? What! is it all so ignoble, so base, that it will not bear the honest light of speech from lips so gifted with "the divine power to use words?" Then what hateful, bitter humiliation for her, to have to give herself up to the reality! Do you think there is ever a bride who does not taste more or less this bitterness in her cup? But who put it there? It must surely be man's fault, not God's, that she has to say to herself, "Soul, look another way-you have no part in this. Motherhood is beautiful, fatherhood is beautiful; but the dawn of fatherhood and motherhood is not beautiful." Do they really think that God is ashamed of what He has made and appointed? And, if not, surely it is somewhat superfluous that they should undertake to be so for Him. The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul. Of a woman above all. It is true that instinct of silence I spoke of is a beautiful, imperishable part of nature too. But it is not beautiful when it means an ignominious shame brooding darkly. Shame is like a very flexible veil, that follows faithfully the shape of what it covers - beautiful when it hides a beautiful thing, ugly when it hides an ugly one. It has not covered what was beautiful here; it has covered a mean distrust of a man's self and of his Creator. It was needed that this silence, this evil spell, should for once be broken, and the daylight let in, that the dark cloud lying under might be scattered to the winds. It was needed that one who could here indicate for us "the path between reality and the soul" should speak. That is what these beautiful, despised poems, the "Children of Adam," do, read by the light that glows out of the rest of the volume: light of a clear, strong faith in God, of an unfathomably deep and tender love for humanity -light shed out of a soul that is "possessed of itself." Herbert H. Gilchrist, ed., Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings (London: T. F. Unwin, 1887), 287-307.

7.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

Under the Microscope There are in him two distinct men of most inharmonious kinds; a poet and a formalist.... It is from no love of foolish paradox that I have chosen the word «formalist" to express my sense of the radical fault in the noble genius of Whitman. For truly no scholar and servant of the past, reared on academic tradition under the wing of old-world culture, was ever more closely bound in with his own

Algernon Charles Swinburne

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theories, more rigidly regulated by his own formularies, than this poet of new life and limitless democracy. Not Pope, not Boileau, was more fatally a formalist than Whitman; only Whitman is a poet of a greater nature than they. It is simply that these undigested formulas which choke by fits the free passage of his genius are to us less familiar than theirs; less real or less evident they are not.... What he says is well said when he speaks as of himself and because he cannot choose but speak; whether he speak of a small bird's loss or a great man's death, of a nation rising for battle or a child going forth in the morning. What he says is not well said when he speaks not as though he must but as though he ought; as though it behooved one who would be the poet of American democracy to do this thing or to be that thing if the duties of that office were to be properly fulfilled, the tenets of that religion worthily delivered. Never before was high poetry so puddled and adulterated with mere doctrine in its crudest form. Never was there less assimilation of the lower dogmatic with the higher prophetic elements.... [It] is one thing to sing the song of all trades, and quite another thing to tumble down together the names of all possible crafts and implements in one unsorted heap; to sing the song of all countries is not simply to fling out on the page at random in one howling mass the titles of all divisions of the earth, and so leave them. At this rate, to sing the song of the language it should suffice to bellow out backwards and forwards the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. And this folly is deliberately done by a great writer, and ingeniously defended by able writers, alike in good faith, and alike in blind bondage to mere dogmatic theory, to the mere formation of foregone opinion. They cannot see that formalism need not by any means be identical with tradition; they cannot see that because theories ofthe present are not inherited they do not on that account become more proper than were theories of the past to suffice of themselves for poetic or prophetic speech. E. Gosse and T.

J. Wise, eds., The Complete Works ofAlgernon Charles Swinburne, vol. 16

(London: Heinemann, 1926), 411-420.

8.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY

((Leaves- of Grass" It is not difficult to point out the central thesis of Walt Whitman's poetical gospel. It is briefly this: the necessity of the establishment of a universal republic, or rather brotherhood of men. And to this is closely joined another, or rather a series of others, indicating the type of man of which this universal republic is to consist, or perhaps which it is to produce. The poet's language in treating the former of these two positions is not entirely uniform; sometimes he speaks as of a federation of nations, sometimes as if mankind at large were to gravitate towards

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the United States, and to find in them the desired Utopia. But the constitution of the United States, at least that constitution as it ought to be, is always and uniformly represented as a sufficient and the only sufficient political means of attaining this Utopia, nay, as having to some extent already presented Utopia as a fact. Moreover, passing to the second point, the ideal man is imaged as the ideal Yankee, understanding that word of course as it is understood in America, not in Europe. He is to be a rather magnificent animal, almost entirely uncultured (this is not an unfair representation, although there are to be found certain vague panegyrics on art, and especially on music), possessing a perfect physique, well nourished and clothed, affectionate towards his kind, and above all things resolved to admit no superior. As is the ideal man, so is the ideal woman to be. Now it may be admitted frankly and at once, that this is neither the creed nor the man likely to prove attractive to many persons east of the Atlantic. If it be said that the creed is a vague creed, and the man a detestable man, there will be very little answer attempted. Many wonderful things will doubtless happen «when," as the poet says, «through these States walk a hundred millions of superb persons"; but it must be allowed that there is small prospect of any such procession. One is inclined for very many sound reasons, and after discarding all prejudices, to opine that whatever salvation may await the world may possibly come from quarters other than from America. Fortunately, however, admiration for a creed is easily separable from admiration for the utterance and expression of that creed, and Walt Whitman as a poet is not difficult to disengage from Walt Whitman as an evangelist and politician. The keyword of all his ideas and of all his writings is universality. His Utopia is one which shall be open to everybody; his ideal of man and woman one which shall be attainable by everybody; his favourite scenes, ideas, subjects, those which everybody, at least to some extent, can enjoy and appreciate. He cares not that by this limitation he may exclude thoughts and feelings, at any rate phases of thought and feeling, infinitely choicer and higher than any which he admits. To express this striving after universality he has recourse to methods both unusual and (to most readers) unwelcome. The extraordinary jumbles and strings of names, places, employments, which deface his pages, and which have encouraged the profane to liken them to auctioneers' catalogues or indexes of encyclopaedias, have no other object than to express this universal sympathy, reaching to the highest and penetrating to the lowest forms of life. The exclusion of culture, philosophy, manners, is owing also to this desire to admit nothing but what is open to every human being of ordinary faculty and opportunities. Moreover, it is to this that we may fairly trace the predominance in Whitman's writings of the sexual passion, a prominence which has given rise, and probably will yet give rise, to much unphilosophical hubbub. This passion, as the poet has no doubt observed, is almost the only one which is peculiar to man as man, the presence of which denotes virility if not humanity, the absence of which is a sign of abnormal temperament. Hence he elevates it to almost the principal place, and treats of it in a manner somewhat shocking to those who are accustomed to speak of such sub-

George Saintsbury

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jects (we owe the word to Southey) enfarinhadamente. As a matter of fact, however, the treatment, though outspoken, is eminently ((clean," to use the poet's own word; there is not a vestige of prurient thought, not a syllable of prurient language. Yet it would bea great mistake to suppose that sexual passion occupies the chief place in Whitman's estimation. There is according to him something above it, something which in any ecstasies he fails not to realize, something which seems more intimately connected in his mind with the welfare of mankind, and the promotion of his ideal republic. This is what he calls ((robust American love." He is never tired of repeating ((I am the poet of comrades" - Socrates himself seems renascent in this apostle of friendship. The Academy (October 10,1874): 398-400.

9.

EDWARD DOWDEN

"The Poetry of Democracy" The principle of political and social equality once clearly conceived and taken to heart as true, works outward through one's body of thought and feeling in various directions. As in the polity of the nation every citizen is entitled by virtue of the fact of his humanity to make himself heard, to manifest his will, and in his place to be respected, so in the polity of the individual man, made up of the faculties of soul and body, every natural instinct, every passion, every appetite, every organ, every power, may claim its share in the government of the man. If a human being is to be honoured as such, then every part of a human being is to be honoured. In asserting one's rights as a man, one asserts the rights of everything which goes to make up manhood.... Having acknowledged that Whitman at times forgets that the ((instinct of silence," as it has been well said, ((is a beautiful, imperishable part .of nature," and that in his manner of asserting his portion of truth there is a crudity which perhaps needlessly offends, everything has been acknowledged, and it ought not to be forgotten that no one asserts more strenuously than does Whitman the beauty, not indeed of asceticism, but of holiness or healthiness, and the shameful ugliness of unclean thought, desire and deed. If he does not assert holiness as a duty, it is because he asserts it so strongly as a joy and a desire, and because he loves to see all duties transfigured into the glowing forms of joys and of desires. The healthy repose and continence, and the healthy eagerness and gratification of appetite, are equally sources of satisfaction to him. If in some of his lyrical passages there seems entire self-abandonment to passion, it is because he believes there are, to borrow his own phrase, ((native moments," in which the desires receive permission from the supreme authority, conscience, to satisfy themselves completely....

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In the way of crude mysticism Whitman takes pleasure in asserting the equality of all natural objects, and forces, and processes, each being as mysterious and wonderful, each as admirable and beautiful as every other; and as the multitude of men and women, so, on occasions, does the multitude of animals, and trees, and flowers press into his poems with the same absence of selection, the same assertion of equal rights, the same unsearchableness, and sanctity, and beauty, apparent or concealed in all. By another working of the same democratic influence (each man finding in the world what he cares to find) Whitman discovers everywhere in nature the same qualities, or types of the same qualities, which he admires most in men. For his imagination the powers of the earth do not incarnate themselves in the forms of god and demi-god, faun and satyr, oread, dryad, and nymph of river and sea - meet associates, allies or antagonists of the heroes of an age, when the chiefs and shepherds of the people were themselves almost demigods. But the great Mother - the Earth - is one in character with her children of the democracy, who, at last, as the poet holds, have learnt to live and work in her great style. She is tolerant, includes diversity, refuses nothing, shuts no one out; she is powerful, full of vitality, generous, proud, perfect in natural rectitude, does not discuss her duty to God, never apologizes, does not argue, is incomprehensible, silent, coarse, productive, charitable, rich in the organs and instincts of sex, and at the same time continent and chaste. The grass Whitman loves as much as did Chaucer himself; but his love has a certain spiritual significance which Chaucer's had not. It is not the "soft, sweet, smale grass," embroidered with flowers, a fitting carpet for the feet of glad knights and sportive ladies, for which he cares. In the grass he beholds the democracy of the fields, earthborn, with close and copious companionship of blades, each blade like every other, and equal to every other, spreading in all directions with lusty life, blown upon by the open air, "coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious." Studies in Literature (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1878), 500-501, 50 4-5 0 5, 515-516.

10. GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Letter to Robert Bridges, October 18, 1882 I have read of Whitman's (1) "Pete" ["Come up from the Fields, Father"] in the library at Bedford Square (and perhaps something else; if so I forget), which you point out; (2) two pieces in the Athenaeum or Academy: this is all I remember. I cannot have read more than a half dozen pieces at most. This, though very little, is quite enough to give a strong impression of his marked and original manner and way of thought and in particular of his rhythm.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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It might be even enough, I shall not deny, to originate or, much more, influence another's style: they say the French trace their whole modern school of landscape to a single piece of Constable's exhibited at the Salon early this century. The question then is only about the fact. But first I may as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not. Nevertheless I believe that you are quite mistaken about this piece and that on second thoughts you will find the fancied resemblance diminish and the imitation disappear. And first for the rhythm. Of course I saw that there was to the eye something in my long lines like this, that the one would remind people of the other. And both are in irregular rhythms. There the likeness ends. The pieces of his I read were mostly in an irregular rhythmic prose: that is what they are thought to be meant for and what they seemed to me to be. Here is a fragment of a line I remember: "or a handkerchief designedly dropped." This is in a dactylic rhythm-or let us say anapaestic; for it is a great convenience in English to assume that the stress is always at the end of the foot; the consequence of which assumption is that in ordinary verse there are only two English feet possible, the iamb and the anapaest, and even in my regular sprung rhythm only one additional, the fourth paeon: for convenience' sake assuming this, then the above fragment is anapaestic 12

3

12

3 12 312

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"or a hand kerchief.... design edly dropped" - and there is a break down, a designed break of rhythm, after "handkerchief," done no doubt that the line may not become downright verse, as it would be ifhe had said "or a handkerchief purposedly dropped." Now you can of course say that he meant pure verse and that the foot is a paeon 123

1

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"or a hand kerchief design edly dropped"; or that he means, without fuss, what I should achieve by looping the syllable de and calling that foot an outriding foot - for the result might be attained either way. Here then I must make the answer which will apply here and to all like cases and to the examples which may be found up and down the poets of the use of sprung rhythm - if they could have done it they would; sprung rhythm, once you hear it, is so eminently natural a thing and so effective a thing that if they had known of it they would have used it. Many people, as we say, have been "burning," but they all missed it; they took it up and mislaid it again. So far as I know - I am inquiring and presently I shall be able to speak more decidedly - it existed in full force in Anglo-Saxon verse and in great beauty; in a degraded and doggerel shape in Piers Ploughman (I am reading that famous poem and am coming to the conclusion that it is not worth reading); Greene was the last who employed it at all [34]

WHITMAN IN THE BRITISH ISLES

consciously and he never continuously; then it disappeared - for one cadence in it here and there is not sprung rhythm and one swallow does not make a spring. (I put aside Milton's case, for it is altogether singular.) In a matter like this a thing does not exist, is not done unless it is wittingly and willingly done; to recognize the form you are employing and to mean it is everything. To apply this: there is (I suppose, but you will know) no sign that Whitman means to use paeons or outriding feet where these breaks in rhythm occur; it seems to me a mere extravagance to think he means people to understand of themselves what they are slow to understand even when marked or pointed out. If he does not mean it then he does not do it; or in short what he means to write-and writes-is rhythmic prose and that only. And after all, you probably grant this. Good. Now prose rhythm in English is always one of two things (allowing my convention about scanning upwards or from slack to stress and not from stress to slack) - either iambic or anapaestic. You may make a third measure (let us call it) by intermixing them. One of these three simple measures then, all iambic or all anapaestic or mingled iambic and anapaestic, is what he in every case means to write. He dreams of no other and he means a rugged or, as he calls it in that very piece «Spirit that formed this scene" (which is very instructive and should be read on this very subject) a «savage" art and rhythm. Extremes meet, and (I must for truth's sake say what sounds pride) this savagery ofhis art, this rhythm in its last ruggedness and decomposition into common prose, comes near the last elaboration ofmine. For that piece ofmine is very highly wrought. The long lines are not rhythm run to seed: everything is weighed and timed in them. Wait till they have taken hold ofyour ear and you will find it so. No, but what it is like is the rhythm ofGreek tragic choruses or ofPindar; which is pure sprung rhythm. And that has the same changes of cadence from point to point as this piece. If you want to try it, read one till you have settled the true places of the stress, mark these, then read it aloud, and you will see. Without this these choruses are prose bewitched; with it they are sprung rhythm, like that piece of mine. Besides, why did you not say Rinser Poplars was like Whitman? The present piece is in the same kind and vein, but developed, an advance. The lines and the stanzas (of which there are two in each poem and havi.ng much the same relation to one another) are both longer, but the two pieces are greatly alike: just look. If so how is this a being untrue to myself? I am sure it is no such thing. The above remarks are not meant to run down Whitman. His "savage" style has advantages, and he has chosen it; he says so. But you cannot eat your cake and keep it: he eats his offhand, I keep mine. It makes a very great difference. Neither do I deny all resemblance. In particular I noticed in Spirit that Formed this Scene a preference for the alexandrine. I have the same preference: I came to it by degrees, I did not take it from him. About diction the matter does not allow me so clearly to point out my independence as about rhythm. I cannot think that the present piece owes anything to him. I hope not, here especially, for it is not even spoken in my own person but in that of St. Winefred's maidens. It ought to sound like the thoughts of a good but Gerard Manley Hopkins

[35]

lively girl and not at all like-not at all like Walt Whitman. But perhaps your mind may have changed by this. C. C. Abbott, ed., The Letters ofGerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 154-158.

11. JOHN ROBERTSON

Walt Whitman: Poet and Democrat The essential thing is that the singer of democracy shall be full charged with his theme; and that an idea which feeds on optimism and confidence shall be carried with a confidence that no adversity will dash. And how Whitman's confidence rays out from his first page! Other poets have sung democracy in moments of expansion, or when goaded by the sight of war and depression: he alone ecstatically points a prosperous demos to new heights of ideal life.... But Whitman is too enormously in earnest, too intensely faithful to laugh. Carlyle, let it be noted, is the one really earnest moralist who has indulged much in humour, and Carlyle's humour grew out of his profound unfaith in humanity. Whitman's faith is as strong as Carlyle's scepticism; and though he may meet one of Carlyle's favourite moral tests by a capacity to laugh broadly at the broadly and simply laughable, he is never heartily humorous in his writing. The humorous propensities of his countrymen get little recognition from him; when he is in a minatory mood-he frequently is in his later prose-he sees in the American habit of jesting on all things one of the unhealthy aspects of things democratic. . . . It may be doubted, however, whether Whitman's lack of humour is not a weakness in him as a propagandist, relatively to the average intellect of his time. Which of us can remain resolutely grave over the intimation that, among other things, the "picturesque looseness of carriage" of the American common people, and "the presidenfs taking off his hat to them, not they to him," are "unrhymed poetry"? The thing is said in all good faith, and a momentary sympathy is possible, though it is not clear why the president should take off his hat to his fellowcitizens save to win their votes; but the smile will break through. Mr. Meredith makes a character observe that cynicism is intellectual dandyism. Perhaps the dictum is truer than its acute author really believed. Take it that cynicism is humour overdone, and we arrive at a conception of humour as the soul's clothing for its nakedness, acutely experienced after modern indulgence in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It may be that the adoption of this is demonstrably an irrational act; but to demonstrate that a joke is an absurdity is but to make the joker a present of another. Logical progress, however, is possible on the understanding that he is a weak creature, and that a stronger may get on in vigorous nakedness. Such a son of Adam is Whitman. He positively does [36]

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not need humour to protect him from his atmosphere, and he has no self-critical qualms about his appearance; being, indeed, by his enemies' account, far too naked to be ashamed. (Edinburgh: William Brown, 1884), 13, 14-16; originally published in the Round Table Series 4.

12.

Sonnet-epigraph to John Robertson's Walt Whitman: Poet and Democrat Strong poet of the sleepless gods that dwell As far above the stars as we beneath, Thy melody, disdaining the soft sheath Of dainty modern music, snaps the spell, And heedless of old forms and fettered plan, Clothes itself carelessly in rough free words, And strikes with giant's hand the inner chords That vibrate in the strong and healthful man! What if our brothers in an age to be, Emerging from the Titan war of Thought, Seize hollow Custom, and with one keen blow Strike off her seven heads, and having smote, Pass on, and with their larger veins aglow With new found vigour, mould themselves to thee! A.A. Last stanza of the second poem which serves as epigraph to Robertson's Walt Whitman: Poet and Democrat: Better forgiveness serene as the sun than the bolt of the storm-god: Better the large faith of love than the Coriolanian cry: Better the eye still bright with the dream of a glorious distance Than the sad grey world of the sage scanning his race from on high; Better the pride of the comrade, great in his vision of greatness, Than the pride of the sage or the scorner, letting his kind pass by. (Anon.)

(Edinburgh: William Brown, 1884); originally published in the Round Table Series 4.

John Robertson

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13.

ERNEST RHYS

Letter to Walt.Whitman, July 7, 1885 At first it seemed rather out of place to have your work in a series of this kind called, rather stupidly, The Canterbury Poets, and got up in a cheap and prettified fashion, with red lines etc. But afterwards it struck me that there might be gain in the end through it.... The very including of Leaves of Grass in a series like this gives them a chance of reaching people .who would otherwise never see them. What I-and many young men like me, ardent believers in your poetic initiative - chiefly feel about this is, however, that an edition at a price which will put it in the hands of the poorest member of the great social democracy is a thing of imperative requirement. You know what a fervid stir and impulse forward ofHumanity there is today in certain quarters! and I am sure you will be tremendously glad to help us here, in the very camp of the enemy, the stronghold of caste and aristocracy and all selfishness between rich and poor! Some people want to class you as the property of a certain literary clique - a rara avis, to be carefully kept out ofsight of the uneducated mob as not able to understand and appreciate the peculiar qualities of your work. This does harm in many ways, and it would be a very good thing to make a fair trial of the despised mob.... What we want then is an edition for the poor, and this proposed one at only a shilling would be within reach of every man willing and caring to read. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1908; reprint, New York: Rowman Littlefield, 1961), 451-453.

14.

RODEN NOEL

((A Study of Walt Whitman" But is equality a truth in the manner in which he asserts it? I believe not; and if not, it must be so far mischievous to assert it. That common manhood is a greater, more cardinal fact than any distinctions among men which raise one above another I most firmly believe. Still these distinctions do exist, and so palpable a fact cannot be ignored without very serious injury. If great men could not have been without average men, and owe most to the grand aggregate soul of the ideal unit, humanity - which is a pregnant truth - yet, on the other hand, this grand aggregate soul could never have been what it is, could never have been enriched with the treasures it now enjoys, without those most personal of all personalitiesprophets, heroes, men of genius.... If these men need to be reminded, as they do,

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13.

ERNEST RHYS

Letter to Walt.Whitman, July 7, 1885 At first it seemed rather out of place to have your work in a series of this kind called, rather stupidly, The Canterbury Poets, and got up in a cheap and prettified fashion, with red lines etc. But afterwards it struck me that there might be gain in the end through it.... The very including of Leaves of Grass in a series like this gives them a chance of reaching people .who would otherwise never see them. What I-and many young men like me, ardent believers in your poetic initiative - chiefly feel about this is, however, that an edition at a price which will put it in the hands of the poorest member of the great social democracy is a thing of imperative requirement. You know what a fervid stir and impulse forward ofHumanity there is today in certain quarters! and I am sure you will be tremendously glad to help us here, in the very camp of the enemy, the stronghold of caste and aristocracy and all selfishness between rich and poor! Some people want to class you as the property of a certain literary clique - a rara avis, to be carefully kept out ofsight of the uneducated mob as not able to understand and appreciate the peculiar qualities of your work. This does harm in many ways, and it would be a very good thing to make a fair trial of the despised mob.... What we want then is an edition for the poor, and this proposed one at only a shilling would be within reach of every man willing and caring to read. Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1908; reprint, New York: Rowman Littlefield, 1961), 451-453.

14.

RODEN NOEL

((A Study of Walt Whitman" But is equality a truth in the manner in which he asserts it? I believe not; and if not, it must be so far mischievous to assert it. That common manhood is a greater, more cardinal fact than any distinctions among men which raise one above another I most firmly believe. Still these distinctions do exist, and so palpable a fact cannot be ignored without very serious injury. If great men could not have been without average men, and owe most to the grand aggregate soul of the ideal unit, humanity - which is a pregnant truth - yet, on the other hand, this grand aggregate soul could never have been what it is, could never have been enriched with the treasures it now enjoys, without those most personal of all personalitiesprophets, heroes, men of genius.... If these men need to be reminded, as they do,

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of the rock whence they are hewn, there is yet a danger of average men mistaking such a message as that of modern democracy through so powerful a spokesman as Whitman, and insisting upon paring down the ideal superiority of their great ones too much to the level of their own inorganic uniformity, rather than acknowledging and venerating what is verily superior in these; taking them for leaders in regions where they are appointed by Nature to lead, and generally aiming to raise themselves as far as possible to the standard of a higher excellence thus set before them. In order to satisfy this law of inequality among men, I do not believe that the mere proclamation of friendly love as between comrades (any more than of sexual love and equal union between man· and woman) is at all sufficient. Veneration, reverence, also must be proclaimed, as likewise necessary; and the great point we ought to aim at, in helping to solve the momentous question of the social future, seems in that respect to be this-that mankind be taught, and gradually accustomed, to place their reverence where reverence is indeed due, and not upon mere idols of popular superstition.... But what Whitman does see so clearly is that, even when men have themselves elected a ruler, or been concerned in the choice of a form of government, there isa sort of glamour of the imagination which immediately invests any actual depositary of power; and bows them in a kind of unreasonable stupor before it. He therefore reminds them-Government exists for you, not you for government. Obey it intelligently; modify it when reason requires. Essays on Poetry and Poets (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, 1886), 330, 331, 332.

15.

ANONYMOUS REVIEW

"American Poets" Such pieces as the burial hymn to Lincoln "When Lilacs Last etc.," or "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," stamp Whitman as a lyric genius of the highest order. In creative force and imaginative vigour Whitman stands, in our opinion, first among American poets. But he has not justified his claim to initiate a new departure in the form or the substance of poetry. 'His finest passages are written when, in the sweep of his lyric passion, he forgets his system and his purpose. His poems come before the world in a shape which is as attractive to some as it is repulsive to others. In either case the audacity ofthe strange attire rivets attention. Yet the form is not new. At their best his lines have the sweep of the Hebrew prophets; they roll in upon the ear, rythmic as the waves beating on the shore. But just as often they resemble the baldest prose of Tupper. Whitman denounces rhyme as the medium of inferior writers and trivial subjects. His slatternly prose irresistibly

Anonymous Review

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suggests the conclusion, that his revolt against the tinkling serenader's style was confirmed, if it was not stimulated, by mechanical incapacity or at least by a want of artistic patience. In the first heat of his revolutionary enthusiasm, he claimed to throw art to the winds, and to demonstrate its futility when applied to the higher forms of poetry. In his maturer judgement he poses as the Wagner of poetry. It is possible, and even probable, that poetry, like music, may undergo great rythmical changes; but whatever change takes place will be in the direction, not of the neglect, but of the development of Art. It is no defence of Whitman's theory, that he wished to render poetry inartistic; it is a complete and adequate defence, that he attempts to reproduce in verse the cosmical symphony, the strong musical pulse that beats throughout the world, the great undersong of the universal surge ofNature. Had this conception been in his mind from the first, had he been an innovator and not a mere iconoclast, he might have worked out his system less crudely. His vocabulary is strong and rich. He bows to no aristocracy of words. He hopes to see the Versailles of verse invaded by the language of the "Halles." He uses whatever expression most forcibly conveys his meaning, without regard to conventionalities. Thus his language is piercingly direct, and he repeatedly strikes out original epithets or phrases which create a picture in themselves. In the protest which Whitman makes against conventionalities of form and language, he did good service, but he only echoes the voice of Emerson. Quarterly Review 163 (July-October 1886): 390-391.

16.

HAVELOCK ELLIS

The New Spirit Beneath the vast growth of Christianity, for ever exalting the unseen by the easy method of pouring contempt on the seen, and still ever producing some strange and exquisite flower of ascesis- a slow force was working underground. A tendency was making itself felt to find in the theoretically despised physicalin those everyday stones which the builders of the Church had rejected - the very foundation of the mysteries of life; if not the basis for a new vision of the unseen, yet for a more assured vision of the seen.... Whitman appeared at a time when this stream of influence, grown mighty, had boldly emerged. At the time that "Leaves of Grass" sought the light Tourgenieff was embodying in the typical figure of Bassaroff the modern militant spirit of science, positive and audacious-a spirit marked also, as Hinton has pointed out, by a new form of asceticism, which lay in the denial of emotion. Whitman, one of the very greatest emotional forces of modern times, who had grown up apart from the rigid and technical methods of science, face to face with a new world and

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a new civilization, which he had eagerly absorbed so far as it lay open to him, had the good inspiration to fling himself into the scientific current, and so to justify the demands of his emotional nature; to represent himself as the inhabitant of a vast and coordinated cosmos, tenoned and mortised in granite.... That Whitman possessed no trained scientific instinct is unquestionably true, but it is impossible to estimate his significance without understanding what he owes to science. Something, indeed, he had gained from the philosophy of Hegel- with its conception of the universe as a single process of evolution, in which vice and disease are but transient perturbations-with which he had a second-hand acquaintance, that has left distinct, but not always well assimilated marks on his work; but, above all, he was indebted to those scie~tific conceptions which, like Emerson, he had absorbed or divined. It is these that lie behind "Children of Adam." This mood of sane and cheerful sensuality, rejoicing with a joy as massive and calm-eyed as Boccaccio's, a moral-fibred joy that Boccaccio never knew, in all the manifestations of the flesh and blood of the world - saying, not: "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," but, with Clifford: "Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together" - is certainly Whitman's most significant and impressive mood. Nothing so much reveals its depth and sincerity as his neverchanging attitude towards death. (London: Bell and Sons, 1890), 112-114.

17.

R. W. RAPER

"The Innings" To take your stand at the wicket in a posture of haughty defiance: To confront a superior bowler as he confronts you: To feel the glow of ambition, your own and that of your side: To be aware of shapes hovering, bending, watching around - whiteflannelled shapes-all eager, unable to catch you. 2

The unusually fine weather, The splendid silent sun flooding all, bathing all in joyous evaporation. Far off a gray-brown thrush warbling in hedge or in marsh; Down there in the blossoming bushes, my brother, what is it that you are saying? 3

To play more steadily than a pendulum; neither hurrying nor delaying, but marking the right moment to strike.

R. W Raper

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4

To slog: 5

The utter oblivion of all but the individual energy: The rapid co-operation of hand and eye projected into the ball; The ball triumphantly flying through air, you too flying. The perfect feel of a fourer! The hurrying to and fro between the wickets: the marvellous quickness of all fields: The cut, leg hit, forward drive, all admirable in their way; The pull transcending all pulls, over the boundary ropes, sweeping, orotund, astral: The superciliousness of standing still in your ground, content, and masterful, conscious of an unquestioned six; The continuous pavilion-thunder bellowing after each true lightning stroke; (And yet a mournful note, the low dental murmur of one who blesses not, I fancied I heard through the roar In a lull of the deafening plaudits; Could it have been the bowler? or one of the fields?) 6

Sing on, gray-brown bird, sing on! now I understand you! Pour forth your rapturous ' and yet a drunken apple-woman reeling in a gutter. But he is not alone in this inconsistency. Almost every competent writer who has attempted to give an estimate ofWhitman has tumbled about in the same extraordinary way. Something mephitic breathes from this strange personality, something that maddens the judgment until the wisest lose their self-control. Therefore, I propound a theory. It is this, that there is no real Walt Whitman, that is to say, that he cannot be taken as any other figure in literature is taken, as an entity of positive value and defined characteristics.... Whitman is mere bathybius; he is literature in the condition of protoplasm - an intellectual organism so simple that it takes the instant impression of whatever mood approaches it. Hence the critic who touches Whitman is immediately confronted with his own image stamped upon that viscid and tenacious surface. He finds, not what Whitman has to give, but what he himself has brought. And when, in quite another mood, he comes again to Whitman, he finds that other self of his own stamped upon the provoking protoplasm.... Almost every sensitive and natural person has gone through a period of fierce Whitmanomania; but it is a disease which rarely afflicts the same patient more than once. It is, in fact, a sort of highly-irritated kind of egotism come to a head, and people are almost always better after it.... Every reader who comes to Whitman starts upon an expedition to the virgin forest. He must take his conveniences with him. He will make of the excursion what his own spirit dictates. There are solitudes, fresh air, rough landscape, and a well of water, but if he wishes to enjoy the latter he must bring his own cup with him. When people are still young and like roughing it, they appreciate a picnic into Whitman-land, but it is not meant for those who choose to see their intellectual comforts round them. Critical Kit-Kats (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896), 96-111.

23. J.

A. MACCULLOCH

"Walt Whitman: The Poet of Brotherhood" But before coming to that stumbling-block to the bourgeois and to the versereading public alike, Whitman's style, a further word may be spoken of the tendencies in American thought when he began to write. The wave of revolution, of illumination, of romanticism which had swept over Europe, passed in succession to America. Puritanism, an uncompromising and bigoted orthodoxy, utilitarianism, Philistinism, had petrified the nation into a rock on which idealism could find scanty foothold. When the new movement arrived it disintegrated these unyielding elements, and was welcomed by a group of men and women who saw in

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it the dawn of a new age of poetry, of social reform, of religious fervour. A Transcendental Club was formed, and found choice spirits in George Ripley, Charles Dana, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Hawthorne and Emerson. With loud voice they proclaimed to the world, Ecce, nunc acceptabile tempus. But the movement became discredited by the wild enthusiasm of many bizarre, crack-brained, and absurd persons; and, though it never lost its possession of a noble ideal, it had to adapt itself to the circumstances of the modern world. Yet it formed a current which has continued to warm and to colour American thought since then. It has resulted in a certain freshness and crispness in literature, such as may readily be seen in the writings of Emerson, of Thoreau, of Lowell, of Longfellow. Nor did Whitman escape it. He is the finest product of the Transcendental movement, the prophet who will sound it forth to future ages. We see in his work the stirring of a new life in America, which we in the Old World cannot eventually escape. Westminster Review (July-December 1899): 550.

24. G. K. CHESTERTON

"Conventions and the Hero" Walt Whitman is, I suppose, beyond question the ablest man America has yet produced. He also happens to be, incidentally, one of the greatest men of the nineteenth century. Ibsen is all very well, Zola is all very well and Maeterlinck is all very well; but we have begun already to get to the end of them. And we have not yet begun to get to the beginning of Whitman. The egoism of which men accuse him is that sense of human divinity which no one has felt since Christ. The baldness of which men accuse him is simply that splendidly, casual utterance which no sage has used since Christ. But all the same, this gradual and glowing conservatism which grows upon us as we live leads us to feel that in just those points in which he violated the chief conventions of poetry, in just those points he was wrong. He was mistaken in abandoning metre in poetry; not because in forsaking it he was forsaking anything ornamental or anything civilized, as he himself thought. In forsaking metre he was forsaking something quite wild and barbarous, something as instinctive as anger and as necessary as meat. He forgot that all real things move in a rhythm, that the heart beats in harmony, that the seas rise and ebb in harmony. He forgot that any child who shouts falls into some sort of repetition and assonance, that the wildest dancing is at the bottom monotonous. The whole of Nature moves in a recurrent music; it is only with a considerable effort of civilization that we can contrive to be other than musical. The whole world talks poetry; it is only we who, with elaborate ingenuity, manage to talk prose. The same that is true of Whitman's violation of metre is true, though in a mi-

G. K. Chesterton

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nor degree, of his violation ofwhat is commonly called modesty. Decorum itself is of little social value; sometimes it is a sign of social decay. Decorum is the morality of immoral societies. The people who care most about modesty are often those who care least about chastity; no better examples could be given than Oriental Courts or the west-end drawing-rooms. But all the same Whitman was wrong. He was wrong because he had at the back of his mind the notion that modesty or decency was in itself an artificial thing. This is quite a mistake. The roots of modesty, like the roots of mercy or of any other traditional virtue, are to be found in all fierce and primitive things. D. Collins, ed., Lunacy and Leners (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), 62-65.

25.

W. T. HAWKINS

Poem Read at Celebration of Whitman's Birthday, May 31,1906 Once more we meet-as pilgrims at a shrine, To reassert our Comradeship sincere: Around the Master's head a wreath t'entwine Then lay it lovingly upon his bier. To dear, dead Walt, who, being dead, yet speaks, In us and through us with the same old tone; Breathing his message, as the ripple breaks Upon the shingle, kissing sand and stone. That message, which the world has scarcely heard, Or, having heard it, has not understood; His life-thought centred in one sacred word, The password of true Comrades- "Brotherhood!" We leave behind the traffic of the mart, We steal away from busy, bustling street; As Comrades, Brothers, standing heart to heart, Breathing the fragrance of his presence sweet. His birthday! The one day of all the year Kept in remembrance by his Comrades true; We chant no mournful dirge, we shed no tear, But joy that we our spirits thus renew.

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"Joy, shipmate, joy!" There sounds his cheery hail! No longer troubles vex, or cares annoy; Do riches flee us? Do we fear to fail? List to the good, glad, cry- "Joy, shipmates, joy!" Have men betrayed us? He will not betray! Have Comrades left us in the hour of need? They were no Comrades: let them pass away; The slaves of passion, prejudice or greed. Hark to the glad old cry that greets us still! Sounding above the ocean's mighty roar; What other message can our bosoms thrill Like that grand greeting from Paumanok's shore? Comrades, join hands! So shall we symbolise The love that binds us with its golden chain. True Comrades; linked in love! Though all else dies, Let this sweet bond of Comradeship remain. Amid the turmoil of the striving days One night each year at least we'll call a halt, And in his memory our glasses raise. And drink the same old toast- "Here's to you, Walt." Annandale Observer, June 15, 1906; reprinted in Paul Salveson, Loving Comrades (Bolton, 1984).

26.

E. M. FORSTER

«The Beauty of Life" Whitman knew what life was. He was not praising its beauty from an armchair. He had been through all that makes it hideous to most men-poverty, the battlefield, the hospitals - and yet could believe that life, whether as a whole or in detail, was perfect, that beauty is manifest wherever life is manifested. He could glorify the absurd and the repulsive; he could catalogue the parts of a machine from sheer joy that a machine has so many parts; he could sing not only of farming and fishing, but also of "leather-dressing, coach-making, boiler-making, ropetwisting, distilling, sign-painting, lime-burning, cotton-picking, electro-plating, electro-typing, stereo-typing"; one of the lines in one of his poems runs thus! He went the "whole hog" in fact, and he ought to be writing this article.

E. M. Forster

[51]

But most of us have to be content with a less vigorous attitude. We may follow the whole-hogger at moments, and no doubt it is our fault and not his when we don't follow him; but we cannot follow him always.... One might define the average educated man as optimist by instinct, pessimist by conviction.... Here then is what one may call the irreducible minimum, the inalienable dowry of humanity: Beauty in scraps. It may seem a little thing after the comprehensive ecstasies of Whitman, but it is certain; it is for all men in all times, and we couldn't avoid it even if we wanted to.... One final tip; read Walt Whitman. He is the true optimist-not the professional optimist who shuts his eyes and shirks, and whose palliatives do more harm than good, but one who has seen and suffered much and yet rejoices. He is not a philosopher or a theologian; he cannot answer the ultimate question and tell us what life is. But he is absolutely certain that it is grand, that it is happiness, and that "wherever life and force are manifested, beauty is manifested." George H. Thomson, ed., Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings (New York: Liveright, 1971), 170, 171, 175.

27.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Letter to Henry Savage, December 22, 1913 What a rum chap you are. Now you're discovering Whitman and humanity. But don't you see, he says all men are my brothers, and straightway goes into the wilderness to love them. Don't let yourself in for a terrific chagrin. But I'm glad you've discovered Humanity: it is fearfully nice to· feel it round one. If you read my poetry - especially the earlier rough stuff which was published in the English Review, and isn't in the book of poems, you would see how much it has meant to me. Only, the bitterness of it is, that while one is brother to all men, and wrote Macbeth with Shakespeare and the Bible with James the First's doctors, one still remains Henry Savage or D. H. Lawrence, with one's own little life to live, and one's own handful of thoughts to write. And it is so hard to combine the two, and not to lose oneself in the generalisation, and not to lose the big joy of the whole in being narrowly oneself. Which is a preach. But perhaps you, like Whitman or Christ, can take the Church to bride, and give yourself, bodily and spiritually, to the abstract. The fault about Whitman is, strictly, that he is too self-conscious to be what he says he is: he's not Walt Whitman, I, the joyous American, he is Walt Whitman, the Cosmos, trying to fit a cosmos inside his own skin: a man ronge with unsatisfiedness not at all pouring his seed into American brides to make Stalwart American Sons, but pouring his seed into the space, into the idea of humanity. Poor man, it is pathetic when he makes even an idea of his own flesh and

[52]

WHITMAN IN THE BRITISH ISLES

blood. He was a martyr like Christ, in a slightly different sort. - I don't mind people being martyrs in themselves, but to make an idea of the flesh and blood is wrong. The flesh and blood must go its own road. There is something wrong with Whitman, when he addresses American women as his Stalwart brides in whom he is to pour the seed for Stalwart Sons. One doesn't think like that. Imagine yourself addressing English women like that, in the mass. One doesn't feel like thatexcept in the moments of wide, gnawing desire when everything has gone wrong- Whitman is like a human document, or a wonderful treatise in human self-revelation. It is neither art nor religion nor truth: Just a self-revelation of a man who could not live, and so had to write himself. But writing should come from a strong root of life: like a battle song after a battle. - And Whitman did this, more or less. But his battle was not a real battle: he never gave his individual self into the fight: he was too much aware of it. He never fought with another person - he was like a wrestler who only wrestles with his own shadow - he never came to grips. He chucked his body into the fight and stood apart saying "Look how I am living." He is really false as hell. - But he is fine too. Only, I am sure, the generalisations are no good to the individual: the individual comes first, then the generalisation is a kind ofgame, not a reality: just a surplus, an excess, not a whole. About spiritual pride, I think you are right. I can't understand you when you think so much of books and genius. They are great too - but they are the cake and wine of life-there is the bread and butter first, the ordinary human contact, the exchange with individuals of a bit of our individual selves, like beggars might exchange bits ~f crust on the road side. But Whitman did not take a person: he took that generalised thing, a Woman, an Athlete, a Youth. And this is wrong, wrong, wrong. He should take Gretchen, or one Henry Wilton. It is no use blanking the person out to have a sort of representative. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Bolton, eds., The Letters oiD. H. Lawrence, vol.

2

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 129-130.

28.

BASIL DE SELINCOURT

"The Problem of the Form" [In] the example that follows, the tone of conversation has passed into that of soliloquy; the mood is too intimate, too remote, to admit of the idea of any but an impersonal utterance; we picture the soul of the poet addressing as it were some shadow of itself: Tears! tears! tears! In the night, in solitude, tears, On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck'd in by the sand, Basil de Selincourt

[53]

Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate, Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head; o what is that ghost? that form in the dark, with tears? What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch'd there on the sand? Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries; o storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach! o wild and dismal night storm, with wind-O belching and desperate! o shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace, But away at night as you fly, none looking-O then the unloosen'd ocean, Of tears! tears! tears! The form here is of such exquisite sensitiveness that it is with an effort we remember the offences its author could commit. The lines "0 who is that ghost" and "What shapeless lump is that" serve just to maintain the air of realistic familiarity that Whitman loves. He takes advantage of the ballast they provide to soar up into heights of suggestion and impressionism where he is equally at home. The storm, the human creature out in it, exchange forces, appearance, personality almost, from line to line. The tears are the rain, but who is it that is weeping? The night, the tempest, the seashore are part of the solitude and the despair they cover, part of the outpouring of passion and sorrow which they liberate, echo and absorb. And how does language take the impress of hints so vague and so conflicting and of an integration so profound? All through the piece alliteration, though never obtruding itself, and indeed never appearing till it is sought out, adds significance to the choice of the words by coaxing the reader to dwell upon them and so helping him to pass naturally over gaps whether of grammar or idea which might otherwise check him; he may observe next how every line, sensitive to the cadence ofthe first, divides itself sympathetically into a succession of lesser impulses, of which there are usually, but not always, three; and finally, as the sign of a still more vital sensitiveness, he will note the repetition of the keynote of the piece, the word "tears." The word is not only repeated, but variously placed in successive lines, so that by maintenance of the emphasis upon it its structural significance may be fully brought out. Then, at what is structurally the centre of the piece, there is a cessation; four lines of release and tumult follow which are silent of it; and so we are prepared for the beauty and inevitability of the final cadence in which it returns. In Tears! Tears! Tears! we have a piece of poetic architecture which is at once completely original and completely satisfying.... The sincerer our devotion to poetry, the more readily we recognise that even in works called great, the form is apt to be a convenient mantle which, though it serves indeed to reveal the living gestures of the poet, serves also to give an average effect of dignity to transitional moments, when he is recovering from one gesture and preparing for the next. Form, as Whitman made use of it, avoids this pitfall. Not pre-existing as a mould to be filled, it cannot attract the feeling that is to fill it. It waits upon

[ 54]

W HIT MAN I NTH E B R I TIS HIS L E S

the feeling, and the feeling when it comes is the more likely to be genuine and sincere. Walt Whitman: A Critical Study (London: Martin and Seeker, 1914; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 79-81, 82.

29.

P. MANSELL JONES

"Whitman and Verhaeren" In considering together Whitman and Verhaeren, it is at once evident that they are, so to speak, poetic anomalies: they are alike in being unlike most other poets. And their importance lies in the fact that they are great not by the standards and virtues of the past, but because they have rebelled greatly and conquered. Yet that which distinguishes them from the vast majority of poets unites them more closely to one another. Both have chosen as themes, not any of the so-called "poetic subjects," but the world as it is today, the world of commerce and industry, of democracy and science. But apart from this modern, universal aspect of their work, each finds in the development of his country a source of inspiration which offers many points of similarity. As young as America, Belgium is still adolescent and feels the joy of newlyacquired strength. As in America, the mixture of peoples and fertility of the soil have engendered a superb and powerful race. Walt Whitman was the cry ofAmerica, at last conscious of her power. Verhaeren proclaims the triumph of the Belgian-the European race. Each is the first adequate singer of his country. For this audacious task, both poets were by nature equally well equipped. Each embodies his country's two main sources of character: French and Flemish in the case of the Belgian poet, English and Dutch in that of the American. Moreover, their composite characters were moulded by similar environments: both combine, in a striking manner, a whole-hearted worship of nature with a love of "populous pavements." They have given the people-their needs and aspirations-a primary place in their works. Verhaeren truly loves the life of the humble. Though he belongs by birth to the middle-classes, his sympathy for the lowest in the social scale enables him to transform the commonplace details of their life into poems of extraordinary beauty and tenderness. He is one of them, says Zweig, and they feel their nearness to him.... Surveying his work towards the end of his life, the author of Leaves of Grass said: "The word I myself put primarily for the description of them as they stand at last is the word Suggestiveness." And a last glance at Whitman's work, so rough and unpolished, yet so rich in the stuff and substance of poetry, seems to drive home the conclusion that Whitman is the fountain-head whence, all uncon-

P. Mansell Jones

[55]

sciously, Verhaeren proceeds. Yet there is no intention to suggest that the former is of less significance than the latter. For if the "comradeship" of Calamus finds its reflection in the "admiration" of La multiple Splendeur, and if, as a song of the modern, Leaves ofGrass is excelled by Les Villes tentaculaires, if, finally, Verhaeren is a greater artist than Whitman, it must not be forgotten that many themeslike those of democracy ~nd death-have been treated more fully by the American than by the Belgian poet. Aberystwyth Studies (Aberystwyth: University College)

30.

2

(1914): 73-74, 104-105.

JOHN COWPER POWYS

Walt Whitman, in Visions and Revisions I want to approach this great Soothsayer from the angle least of all profaned by popular verdicts. I mean from the angle of his poetry. We all know what a splendid heroic Anarchist he was. We all know with what rude zest he gave himself up to that «Cosmic Emotion," to which in these days the world does respectful, if distant, reverence. We know his mania for the words «en masse," for the words «ensemble," «democracy" and «libertad." We all know his defiant celebrations of Sex, of amorousness, of maternity; of that Love of Comrades which «passeth the love of women." We know the world-shaking effort he made-and to have made it at all, quite apart from its success, marks him a unique genius! - to write poetry about every mortal thing that exists, and to bring the whole breathing palpable world into his Gargantuan Catalogues. It is absurd to grumble at these Inventories of the Round Earth. They may not all move to Dorian flutes, but they form a background -like the lists of the Kings in the Bible and the lists of the Ships in Homer-against which, as against the great blank spaces of Life itself, «the writing upon the wall" may make itself visible. What seems much less universally realized is the extraordinary genius for sheer «poetry" which this Prophet of Optimism possessed.... The «free" poetry ofWalt Whitman obeys inflexible, occult laws, the laws commanded unto it by his own creative instinct. We need, as Nietzsche says, to learn the art of «commands" of this kind. Transvaluers of old values do not spend all their time sipping absinthe. Is it a secret, then, the magical unity of rhythm, which Walt Whitman has conveyed to the words he uses? Those long, plangent, wailing lines, broken by little gurgling gasps and sobs; those sudden thrilling apostrophes and recognitions; those far-drawn flute-notes; those resounding sea-trumpets; all such effects have their place in the great orchestral symphony he conducts. Take that little poem - quite spoiled before the end by a horrible bit of democratic vulgarity-which begins:

[ 56]

WH I T MAN IN TH E B RI TIS HIS LE S

Come, I will build a Continent indissoluble; I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone uponIs it possible to miss the hidden spheric law which governs such a challenge? Take the poem which begins: In the growths, by the margins of pond-watersDo you not divine, delicate reader, the peculiar subtlety of that reference to the rank, rain-drenched anonymous weeds, which every day we pass in our walks inland? A botanical name would have driven the magic of it quite away. Walt Whitman, more than anyone, is able to convey to us that sense of the unclassified pell-mell, of weeds and stones and rubble and wreckage, ofvast, desolate spaces, and spaces full of debris and litter, which is most of all characteristic of your melancholy American landscape, but which those who love England know where to find, even among our trim gardens. No one like Walt Whitman can convey to us the magical ugliness of certain aspects of Nature-the bleak, stunted, God-forsaken things; the murky pools where the grey leaves fall; the dead reeds where the wind whistles no sweet fairy tunes; the unspeakable margins of murderous floods; the tangled sea-drift, scurfed with scum; the black sea-windrow of broken shells and dead fishes' scales; the roots of willow trees in moonlit places crying out for demon-lovers; the long, moaning grass that grows outside the walls of prisons; the leprous mosses that cover paupers' graves; the mountainous wastes and blighted marsh-lands which only unknown wild-birds ever touch with their flying wings, and of which madmen dream-these are the things, the ugly, terrible things, that this great optimist turns into poetry. "Yo honk!" cries the wild goose, as it crosses the midnight sky. Others may miss that mad-tossed shadow, that heart-breaking defiance-but from amid the drift of leaves by the roadside, this bearded Fakir of Outcasts has caught its meaning; has heard, and given it its answer. (London: Macdonald & Co., 1915; reprint, London: Vintage Books, 1974), 209, 212-213.

31.

PADRAIC COLUM

«The Poetry of Walt Whitman" Somewhere in the beginning of our histories of Philosophy is the name of the thinker who first announced that the World was a Becoming. That intuition was left to the philosophers until Walt Whitman arrived. And with Whitman the Becoming seems not only to be realized, but to be participated in. All is urge in his

Padraic Colum

[57 ]

poetry. His rhythms flow and break like waves. His stanzas have not the measure that belongs to the poets of a world that is established - poets like Dante and Spenser, for instance-but the balances that are set in nature-one living member balancing another living member, as in a branching tree. His verse not merely departs from traditional forms. It creates a new and special norm. It is special in as much as it exists only for Whitman's purpose, but it is a norm-that is to say, any departures from it can be perceived.... Hardly any poet has revised his original texts more than Whitman has. And it can be perceived that all his revision has the effect of making his lines conform to his versenorm. "Flood-tide of the river, flow on! I watch you face to face," is the opening he once had for Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. If one substitutes this line for the line that opens the poem now, one can see that the norm is disturbed: Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face; Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me! ... Whitman isa master of language as well as a master of his special verse-form. His is one of the greatest vocabularies of any poet who has written in English. What an array ofwords is in his volume! squatter's words; hobo's words; drummer's words; foreign phrases; words out of scientific and philosophic texts, with all the words of literary and journalistic English. And he uses all these words with such precision and vigor that he stamps them anew.... Every line in his verse is so vividly felt and so powerfully realized that it stands as solid as a bar of iron.... Then there is in Whitman the clear and tender-toned poet. The themes of the poet are affection, reconciliation, death. When he sings of death he has a strangely beautiful accent. It is as if all the things that had kept him companythose tremendous shows and processions that his will and his vision bound him to-were folded away fro~ .him. He is Ruth to the Universe's Naomi. "Whither thou goest I will go," he says, and his trust makes beautiful his most haunting poems - Passage to India, the lovely Death Carol beginning "Come, Lovely and Soothing Death," Whispers of Heavenly Death; Darest Thou Now, a Soul; Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, and The Last Invocation with its hushed lyricism. Did Whitman feel an unwonted power upon him when he sang of death? It would seem as if he did. It is something outside himself that prompts the lines of the Death Carol, a bird singing. And in Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking the bird that sings of separation is named demon. Whitman surely was aware when he gave that strange name to the bird that the demon in tradition is the spiritual power beyond our own soul that prompts to extraordinary manifestations. New Republic (June 14, 1919): 213-214.

[58]

WHITMAN IN THE BRITISH ISLES

32.

HUGH L' ANSON FAUSSETT

Walt Whitman: Poet ofDemocracy It was ... increasingly difficult to avoid seeing the scramble for wealth as the dominating motive of the time, not merely in the feverish gold-rush to California in 1849-50, but in the city government itself. Yet it was neither in his nature nor his experience to question the individualism of which a ruthless pursuit of self-interest was an extreme expression. He was born into a tenaciously individual class, nourished on the self-reliant gospels ofFranklin and Jefferson, and suspicious of any encroachments by a central government upon independent rights. The phase of material development during which he lived as well as his own pronounced egoism prevented him from being in any radical sense a socialist. Even today in America the conception of a society reorganised so that the cooperative impulse supersedes the competitive grows very slowly. And Whitman was too naively of his time to be a hundred years in front of it. His sympathies were all for brotherhood, but for a brotherhood of individuals who had surrendered none of their private rights. The acquisitive individual was an unfortunate by-product of such freedom, but less dangerous to the health of a society than an intrusive Government. It was and is an understandable view. But it was based on a serious underestimate of the vicious strength of the acquisitive impulse, through which democracy in America has been persistently defeated by plutocracy, and on a very limited conception of Government. Whitman resisted any extension of Governmental authority because he viewed it always as something imposed upon individuals. He never seems to have conceived of it as a possibly organic expression of their social consciousness and as such liberating them from a conflict of selfish impulses. At bottom his political views were limited by his own gospel of egoism. Seeing, as he did, so imperfectly what a real self-hood entailed, he was equally blind to the sacrifice of selfish independence necessary to the individual who would lose and find himself in an integrated society. And so, in theory at least, he was always to remain a merely humanitarian democrat despite all the inhumanities which a laissez-faire system was increasingly !o display. (London: Cape, 1942 ), 93-94.

33. v.

S. PRITCHETT

"Two Writers and Modern War" The American Civil War was the first modern war.... [In the work of writers before this] there is no suggestion that war is a human tragedy. This suggestion is

v. S. Pritchett

[59]

32.

HUGH L' ANSON FAUSSETT

Walt Whitman: Poet ofDemocracy It was ... increasingly difficult to avoid seeing the scramble for wealth as the dominating motive of the time, not merely in the feverish gold-rush to California in 1849-50, but in the city government itself. Yet it was neither in his nature nor his experience to question the individualism of which a ruthless pursuit of self-interest was an extreme expression. He was born into a tenaciously individual class, nourished on the self-reliant gospels ofFranklin and Jefferson, and suspicious of any encroachments by a central government upon independent rights. The phase of material development during which he lived as well as his own pronounced egoism prevented him from being in any radical sense a socialist. Even today in America the conception of a society reorganised so that the cooperative impulse supersedes the competitive grows very slowly. And Whitman was too naively of his time to be a hundred years in front of it. His sympathies were all for brotherhood, but for a brotherhood of individuals who had surrendered none of their private rights. The acquisitive individual was an unfortunate by-product of such freedom, but less dangerous to the health of a society than an intrusive Government. It was and is an understandable view. But it was based on a serious underestimate of the vicious strength of the acquisitive impulse, through which democracy in America has been persistently defeated by plutocracy, and on a very limited conception of Government. Whitman resisted any extension of Governmental authority because he viewed it always as something imposed upon individuals. He never seems to have conceived of it as a possibly organic expression of their social consciousness and as such liberating them from a conflict of selfish impulses. At bottom his political views were limited by his own gospel of egoism. Seeing, as he did, so imperfectly what a real self-hood entailed, he was equally blind to the sacrifice of selfish independence necessary to the individual who would lose and find himself in an integrated society. And so, in theory at least, he was always to remain a merely humanitarian democrat despite all the inhumanities which a laissez-faire system was increasingly !o display. (London: Cape, 1942 ), 93-94.

33. v.

S. PRITCHETT

"Two Writers and Modern War" The American Civil War was the first modern war.... [In the work of writers before this] there is no suggestion that war is a human tragedy. This suggestion is

v. S. Pritchett

[59]

not made until the civilian fights. He cannot shrug his shoulders and say, «C'est la guerre." He is stunned by his own fears, stupefied by his own atrocities, amazed at his happiness, incredulous at the point of death. When all people are at war, no code, no manner, can contain the experience. The nearest writers to Whitman are Tolstoy and Erckmann-Chatrian - it is interesting to note that they were all writing about war at the same time-but Tolstoy's ironical pacifism and ErckmannChatrian's mildness and peaceableness are a branch of the main stream of popular feeling. They are not, like Whitman, the stream itself. The Histoire d'un Conscrit de 1813 was written in 1864. It has been called l'Iliade de la peur and it portrays the pathos of the conscript's situation. The tragedy of the conscript is a passive one: that a quiet, peaceable man like himself should be killed. But in Whitman - as in Wilfred Owen - the tragedy is not passive; it lies not only in what is done to a man but in what he himself does and in what happens to him inside.... [Tolstoy and Erckmann-Chatrian] are propagandists with an uncommonly delicate ear. They write to warn opinion in the fond domestic parlour behind the little shop. Compared with them, Whitman does not know his mind. He is all over the place. He is the public. It is typical of Specimen Days that its first picture of the war is of the news spreading in the streets at night. The emotion of the street catches him. He is not intoxicated with patriotism but he does not deny the message of the pennants and the flags in the street. He is the man in the parlour who goes out into the street and loses his head. He feels the herd instinct. Two great wars have made us guarded, and when we read Specimen Days and especially the poems called Drum-Taps, we resist that old-fashioned war. The sun has faded the defiant and theatrical photograph, and paled the headlines to a weak-tea brown. The uniforms are shabby. We suspect Whitman's idea that out of this a nation is born; it sounds like the cracked bugle and slack drum of propaganda. And yesterday's propaganda puts no one in a flurry. Yet, in all this, the loquacious Whitman is right. It is the bewildering thing in all his work, that this dressed-up egotist with all the air of a ham actor, is always half-right when he is most dubious. He is the newspaper man who reflects the ambiguous quality of public feeling. His virtue is that he begins on the pavement and that, like the streets, he has no shame and no style. Excitement and incantation take the place of it.... After this the reality begins. And the reality, as the first modern war drags on, is the casualty list. In the classic~l narratives men are merely shot. Sometimes they are blown up. The aftermath was not minutely described. «Bloodshed," «carnage," generalise it. Whitman too, uses those words but with all his voice.... That discovery marks the beginning of the modern attitude to war. We write as followers, not leaders. And though Whitman likes the heroic act, the message in the leader's eye, enjoys seeing the President ride past with his escort of cavalry and feels the public emotion of the «great convulsive drums," he writes more surely when he goes back to the rank and file, when he recovers his sense of anonymity. (Odd that this huge and often so flaccid egotist should be able to puff himself

[60]

WHITMAN IN THE BRITISH ISLES

large enough until he is identified with all the people and lost in them; it is his paradox.) It is his paradox, too, that doggerel and the real thing traipse along together like the blind leading the blind, unable to see, unable to stop.... Drum- Taps describes the general scene, what the unknown and anonymous man did and saw and how filthily he died. Patriotism has not decayed; but the human being has emerged. He emerged first of all, it is interesting to observe, in a civil war, a war of ideas; and in the country which, to so many people, had seemed the Promised Land, where no formal tradition of war existed. Whitman himself observed, in his confused groping way, that a new way of warfare was necessary to America. A new way of writing about war certainly emerged; perhaps that is what he was trying to say. The Living Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946), 166-172.

34. J.

MIDDLETON MURRY

"Walt Whitman: Prophet of Democracy" The universal of which "these States" were the particular in Whitman's poetry is Democracy; and all over the world democrats, in Whitman's peculiar and profound sense of the word-that is, those who believe that a self-governing society of free and responsible individuals offers the only way of progress towards the Good-have had no difficulty in regarding Whitman's America as the city of their own soul. It is for them a symbol of the ideal, of the same order as Blake's Albion and Jerusalem; and Whitman in rhapsodizing over the rivers and prairies of America, is behaving as Shakespeare's poet, "who gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name" - except that the ideal Democracy is much more than "an airy nothing." It is at least a compelling vision of the society towards which humanity must stumble on, if it is not to cease to be human.... [Writing] as late as 1904 Henry Bryan Binns, his English biographer, speaking of Whitman's dismissal in 1865 from his clerkship in the Indian Bureau in Washington, as the result of the reading of Leaves ofGrass by his Methodist chief, says: "Average American opinion was then undisguisedly hostile, as, of course, it still remains." If that was really the situation in America in 1904, it was distinctly different from that in England, where by that time his book had been accepted as a classic by the Liberal intellectuals, and as a sort of bible by the native British Socialist movement, which, though it had a fair sprinkling of intellectuals, had a solid working-class core. Perhaps the explanation of this discrepancy is that quite early in the nineteenth century the Britis~ working class had become more or less completely urbanized, and Whitman's poetry had, for the part of it which was sufficiently alert to become Socialist, a powerful nostalgic attraction as a poetry of

]. Middleton Murry

[61]

the open country and the open air. And it is very probable that the curious, but very marked association of the early Socialist movement in England with camping and hiking, on foot or cycle in the countryside is almost entirely due to the influence of Whitman.... [The] matrix is more important than the gems; the total Whitman far more dynamic, far more charged with potential for humanity, than his rounded utterances. The Whitman who gropes his way from the basis of his deep and newdiscovered personality, his identified soul, into the vast variety of his incomplete affirmations; who offers himself with all his hesitations, his contradictions, and his deep unformulable faith, to his comrades of the future is a truly prophetic man. He is, in part, the attractive image of the citizen of the new completely human society of which the crude integument is what we call Democracy; he is, in a yet more important part, the tongue-tied soul in his travail of the idea of which he is the instinctive vehicle. And this part of him, which is quite inseparable from the other, is perhaps even more durable than the image of the rounded man which he communicates. For it is inherent in this conception of Democracy, as the constant, endless breaking of the fallows of humankind for the sowing of the seed of personality, that it should never reach finality. Milton Hindus, ed., Leaves ofGrass One Hundred Years After (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1955), 125, 136, 143.

35.

DAVID DAICHES

"Walt Whitman's Philosophy" How could Whitman take a normative attitude to the civilization of his day if at the same time he accepted everything in existence merely because it was in existence? I think the answer to this question lies in Whitman's view of the nature of a real person. Inanimate Nature and animals were all to be accepted; they were what they were, part of the process of things. But men - who were alone capable of betraying their identities by leading second-hand lives in which their real selves were not involved-could be judged in accordance with the degree to which they fulfilled the true laws of their own personalities. It is significant that after Swinburne turned against Whitman, to write a stinging attack on the man and his poetry, Whitman remarked of the furious English poet: "Ain't he the damndest simulacrum?" Swinburne, in talking this frenzied nonsense, was acting as a simulacrum, a pale image of his real self, not in his true capacity as a person. And this is the way in which Whitman tended to speak of those he disliked and, indeed, of all evil in the universe. He did not hold simply that "whatever is, is right," but rather that whatever exists in its true, undistorted nature is good. The "parcel of

[ 62]

WH I TMAN IN TH E B RI TI S HIS LES

helpless dandies" that he attacked were denounced as «all second-hand, or third, fourth, or fifth hand," and that was the real burden of his complaint. Now I think that this helps to explain, too, Whitman's increasing insistence on his originality as he grew·older. In repudiating an obvious debt to Emerson andas Esther Shephard has pointed out - concealing a significant debt to two novels of George Sand, Whitman cannot be acquitted of disingenuousness; but we can see why it was important to him to keep stressing his originality. The real poet was essentially original, true to his own vision, transcribing nothing at second-hand. If Whitman had thought more carefully about the problem of originality, he would have seen that it is not necessarily incompatible with borrowing: nobody now denies the originality of Shakespeare's genius because he took his plots from other writers. But he was so obsessed with the importance of renouncing the secondhand, of exploiting only his own true self, that he felt it necessary to repudiate with increasing urgency any suspicion of borrowing. Literary Essays (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1956), 79-80.

36. w.

H. AUDEN

"D. H. Lawrence" The difference between formal and free verse may be likened to the difference between carving and modelling; the formal poet, that is to say, thinks of the poem he is writing as something already latent in the language which he has to reveal, while the free verse poet thinks of language as a plastic passive medium upon which he imposes his artistic conception. One might also say that, in their attitude towards art, the formal verse writer is a catholic, the free verse writer a protestant. And Lawrence was, in every respect, very protestant indeed. As he himself acknowledged, it was through Whitman that he found himself as a poet, found the right idiom of poetic speech for his demon. On no other English poet, so far as I know, has Whitman had a beneficial influence; he could on Lawrence because, despite certain superficial resemblances, their sensibilities were utterly different. Whitman quite consciously set out to be the Epic Bard of America and created a poetic persona, not an actual human being, even when he appears to be talking about the most intimate experiences. When he sounds ridiculous, it is usually because the image of an individual obtrudes itself comically upon what is meant to be a statement about a collective experience. I am large. I contain multitudes is absurd if one thinks of Whitman himself or any individual; of a corporate person like General Motors it makes perfectly good sense. The more we learn about Whitman the man, the less like his persona he looks. On the other hand it is doubtful if a writer ever existed who had

W. H. Auden

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less of an artistic persona than Lawrence; from his letters and the reminiscences of his friends, it would seem that he wrote for publication in exactly the same way as he spoke in private. (I must confess that 1 find Lawrence's love poems embarrassing because of their lack of reticence; they make me feel a Peeping Tom.) Then, Whitman looks at life extensively rather than intensively. No detail is dwelt upon for long; it is snapshotted and added as one more item to the vast American catalogue. But Lawrence in his best poems is always concerned intensively with a single subject, a bat, a tortoise, a fig tree, which he broods on until he has exhausted its possibilities. The Dyer's Hand (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 287-288.

37.

ANTHONY BURGESS

"The Answerer" British musicians have been better Whitman publicists than British men of letters. Whitman, a bad poet to quote (as Uncle Penderevo admits in Tono-Bungay), was learned by heart by thousands of provincial choral singers - those who tackled Delius's Sea-Drift, Vaughan Williams's A Sea Symphony, Holst's Dirge for Two Veterans, eventually Bliss's Morning Heroes. Because Whitman, like the Bible, seemed to stand on the margin of art, composers saw that they could add some art to him. More than that, he was democratic, even sweaty, and the right librettist for a musical renaissance that turned against Mendelssohnian salons and went to the sempiternal soil. Whitman's free verse (not vers libre, a very salony thing) was a corrective to the four-square folkiness that bedevilled so many rural rhapsodies and even The Planets, but his rhythms were lyrical or declamatory, not-like Eliot and Pound (who eventually made a peace with Whitman, having «detested him long enough") - muffled, arhetorical, conversational. Whitman's verse-technique is still of interest to the prosodist. His basic rhythm is an epic one-the Virgilian dactyl-spondee-and his line often hexametric.... He sometimes sounds like Clough's Amours de Voyage, though it would be hard to imagine a greater disparity of tone and attitude than that which subsists between these two Victorians. Nevertheless, both Clough and Whitman saw that the loose hexameter could admit the contemporary and sometimes the colloquial. . . . When Whitman becomes «free," it is as though he justifies truncation or extension of the basic hexameter by some unspoken theory of a line-statement or lineimage. Flouting classical procedure in refusing to allow any spill-over from line to line, he invokes a tradition older than Virgil- that of Hebrew poetry. British composers, their noses well-trained, sniffed the Bible in Whitman. Urgent Copy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 48-49. [64]

WHITMAN IN THE BRITISH ISLES

38.

DENIS DONOGHUE

"Walt Whitman" [We] have to ask what Whitman's freedom gave him, besides ease. In one sense he was, indeed, free; he put down burdens which other men sustained. But it may be argued that in another sense he was bound, because he was ignorant of what he disowned. There is no evidence that he conn'd old times sufficiently to know them as sturdy and different from his own: certainly, he did not propose a relation to the past based upon that knowledge. So it is necessary to say that he freed himself from human history without taking the precaution, in the first instance, of thoroughly understanding it. Whatever worth we ascribe to his freedom, it must allow for that limitation, that its facility was not profoundly earned. That is why his message, so far as it may be described as such, is dispensable. He was, by his own assertion, a prophet and a sage, but his prophecy was somewhat meretricious, his wisdom untested. What matters, after all, is the poetry. To get the beauty of Whitman's poetry hot, one must read it in long, rolling stretches. No poet is less revealed in the single phrase, the image, or even the line. The unit of the verse is indeed the phrase, a loose-limbed structure of several words easily held together and moving along because the cadence goes with the speaker's breath. This is what William Carlos Williams learned from Whitman, the natural cadence, the flow of breath as a structure good enough for most purposes and better for humanity than the counting of syllables. For both poets the ideal is what Whitman called "a redeeming language,» a language to bridge the gap between subject and object, thereby certifying both and praising bridges. Again in both poets the function of language is to verify an intricate network of affinities and relationships, contacts, between person and person, person and place, person and thing. In Whitman, the number of completely realized poems is small: many poems contain wonderful passages, but are flawed, often by a breach of taste, a provincialism. Where the poem fails, it fails because Whitman thought too well of his excess to curb it; the words converge upon the poem, and he will not turn them aside. Some of his greatest writing is in "Song of Myself,» but on the other hand that poem, too, is often provincial, awkward. The best of Whitman, certainly one of his greatest achievements, is a shorter poem, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.» William Carlos Williams once praised a poem by Marianne Moore as an anthology of transit, presumably because the words secured a noiseless progression from one moment to another: they did not sit down to admire themselves. Whitman's favourite subject is movement, process, becoming: no wonder he loved bridges and ferries, which kept things moving while defining relationships, one thing with another. Marcus Cunliffe, ed., American Literature to 1900 (London: Sphere Books, 1975), 275- 276.

Denis Donoghue

[65]

39.

GEOFFREY GRIGSON

The Private Art: A Poetry Notebook A poem should be words locked into a form and so made indestructible or hard to destroy, whether the words are fitted into already determined forms, or whether they find their own form as they go along, to each poem its own form. So there isn't really a contradiction between the tight compressed regularity of a poem by an Icelandic or Norwegian scald of the Middle Ages and a poem by Whitman or St.-John Perse, or between a poem by Hopkins and a poem by Whitman. Hopkins was upset to have to recognize his kinship with Whitman.... From North America I once had a ninny poet in the house. He could not be persuaded that poets occur in a population by rare genetic accident, little related to numbers, although their nurture and their maturation will much depend on culture and economics. He wasn't going to accept from me that in the great population of his continent there might have been - there may have been - no very remarkable poet since John Crowe Ransom, and Whitman. The most - at any rate the best - in fewest words. Which condemns, if that were necessary, Olson and the upright or vertical paper poets of America. But not Whitman. And then what is always required, from each if possible, isn't too little of the most in the fewest words, but plenty of it, plenty of risks undertaken.... How Whitman's rhetoric deflates to a wrinkled toy balloon when he unhooks too long from the objectivity of his great America-stars, lilac, rivers, wharfs, ferries, the cavalry in the ford, the net around the fish, and all of his"eternal uses of the earth," his "primal sanities" of Nature. How he conveys when his exclamation is particular! Whitman thrilled to a high voltage of new America, a beginning, a continent flowering (into what subsequent flowers, if only he had known). Hopkins, his contemporary in small England, thrilled, while it was still possible, to a high voltage of the divine, opening its apparent flowers to him. It is hard to see how there can again be grandly equivalent coincidences of the poet and the situation. But doesn't Whitman say that the best poems are still to be written, and that in his opinion «no definition that has ever been made sufficiently encloses the name Poetry; nor can any rule or convention ever so absolutely obtain but some great exception may arise and disregard it and overturn it"? Anyhow the company chairman and the Foreign Minister and the editor and the union boss and the detective inspector and the engineer mayn't believe it, but no poetry, in whatever future convention, would mean no humanity. (London and New York: Allison and Busby, 1982), 78, 187, 216, 219.

[66]

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40.

CHARLES TOMLINSON

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" To cross a ferry that is no longer there, The eye must pilot you to the further shore: It travels the distance instantaneously And time also: the stakes that you can see Raggedly jettying into nothingness Are the ghosts of Whitman's ferry: their images Crowding the enfilade of steel and stone Have the whole East River to reflect upon And the tall solidities it liquifies. Notes from New York and Other Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 16.

41.

JOHN BAYLEY

"Songs of a Furtive Self: Whitman" The fact is that Whitman was not really doing anything American at all in Song ofMyself, whatever the appearances; he was creating a new language and style for self-expression - the physical sense of self-as Keats had done thirty years or so before. Keats's sensuality of language can often be slightly shamefaced, but it is not furtive; furtiveness implies a carefully worked out undercover programme, such as the genius of Whitman could organize. The effects of Keats's language, though, are remarkably similar to Whitman's - "The Eve of St. Agnes" and Sleep and Poetry are in terms of their verbal world the nearest kind of poetry to Song ofMyself. Even Keats's neologisms have an exact parallel in Whitman's exuberances and demotic oddities.... Whitman's gallicisms are an essential part of his style, its total and original "campness," and like Keats's intuitions in language of the nature and feel of the body Whitman's sense of it seems also to need that posture of touching and unwitting absurdity and vulnerability which belongs to human nakedness. This his fervency of language, like Keats's provides.... Like Keats's Whitman's language has what might be termed erectile tendencies ("Those movements, those improvements of our bodies," as Byron blandly remarks) and its exuberance and oddities seem wholly natural for this reason. There is nothing pretentious or metaphysical about the neologisms of either poet; they seem to expand into a world not of ingenuity but of vivid physical simplicity, a verbal equivalent of what Whitman calls "the curi-

John Bayley

[67]

40.

CHARLES TOMLINSON

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" To cross a ferry that is no longer there, The eye must pilot you to the further shore: It travels the distance instantaneously And time also: the stakes that you can see Raggedly jettying into nothingness Are the ghosts of Whitman's ferry: their images Crowding the enfilade of steel and stone Have the whole East River to reflect upon And the tall solidities it liquifies. Notes from New York and Other Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 16.

41.

JOHN BAYLEY

"Songs of a Furtive Self: Whitman" The fact is that Whitman was not really doing anything American at all in Song ofMyself, whatever the appearances; he was creating a new language and style for self-expression - the physical sense of self-as Keats had done thirty years or so before. Keats's sensuality of language can often be slightly shamefaced, but it is not furtive; furtiveness implies a carefully worked out undercover programme, such as the genius of Whitman could organize. The effects of Keats's language, though, are remarkably similar to Whitman's - "The Eve of St. Agnes" and Sleep and Poetry are in terms of their verbal world the nearest kind of poetry to Song ofMyself. Even Keats's neologisms have an exact parallel in Whitman's exuberances and demotic oddities.... Whitman's gallicisms are an essential part of his style, its total and original "campness," and like Keats's intuitions in language of the nature and feel of the body Whitman's sense of it seems also to need that posture of touching and unwitting absurdity and vulnerability which belongs to human nakedness. This his fervency of language, like Keats's provides.... Like Keats's Whitman's language has what might be termed erectile tendencies ("Those movements, those improvements of our bodies," as Byron blandly remarks) and its exuberance and oddities seem wholly natural for this reason. There is nothing pretentious or metaphysical about the neologisms of either poet; they seem to expand into a world not of ingenuity but of vivid physical simplicity, a verbal equivalent of what Whitman calls "the curi-

John Bayley

[67]

ous sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body," and its "thin red jellies." Discovering the body in poetry was not quite the same thing as discovering America. More fortunate than Keats in this as in other ways, Whitman did not feel that he had to pass himself for the higher life in order to discover America. Furtiveness came naturally to him, but it had the simple health of inner shamelessness: he was not in thrall to romantic ideas of the European tradition, the spirit and its lofty destiny, as Keats was. The age and the expectations that ordained for Keats the romantic hero's role, in opposition to his own poetic genius, left Whitman wholly free to loaf about on fish-shaped Paumanok, clam-digging and declaiming Shakespeare to the waves. Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984),2-3.

42.

CHARLES TOMLINSON

"Ivor Gurney's 'Best Poems'" [The first London performance] of the Sea Symphony brought together two of [Ivor] Gurney's heroes- Vaughan Williams and Walt Whitman. Vaughan Williams's spacious and dramatic settings of Whitman's poems deal with texts that were to be increasingly important for Gurney. Except for Lawrence, it is hard to think of any other English poet who has known what to do with Whitman. Gurney-dangerously, one might have thought-identified himself with Whitman and earned his right to do so not only in his excellent "New England poems" but in masterpieces like "Felling a Tree." He wrote this last, having emerged from the war, in 1922 when his days of freedom were already numbered. During his asylum years, evidently round about 1925, Gurney compiled a forgotten selection entitled "Best poems," the manuscript of which has only recently come to light in a Gloucestershire sale room.... It contains "Felling a Tree" and many other Whitmanian pieces. One of these, "Of the Sea," has never appeared in selections of Gurney and is a remarkable celebration of that poet who helped give him a standard beyond the constrictions of English Georgianism: Cornwall surges round Zennor like the true delight Of earth all savage with a force enemy to manBude streams a long roller of curled gathering foam. But nothing more than Masefield I have come truly To know, Great Ocean with huge strength untamed or stilly, Or Marryat's sea affairs so local and snug of the foc'sle. Mightiness of the wide Atlantic hiding its strength,

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Or tempested Long Island or Massachusetts land Bretagne, and Baltic, the Californian long sand length; The dark October lowering of South Dorset "Dynasts" has shown to me, these are not to forgetSeen of my deep mind reading the northeast blind Dawn through. But of all things most of the sea to meThere is Longney Reach to Priding beating victoriously In a great June exultation of half-tide Severn. And Trafalgar ships moving like painted things Over a painted sea-and Walt Whitman true sight, haunted sea. "The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage - melancholy Rhythm-" And this is ocean's poem to compel Poetry in the heart of a boy late night working; Men giving life of the huge unseen mid Atlantic swell. One of the surprising things about Gurney's attachment to Whitman was that it did not lead to mere superfluity. The piled-up, almost laborious effects of "Felling a Tree" serve the theme of the poem itself. "Of the Sea," though shorter, achieves a comparable massive simplicity of utterance in a style which characterizes another poem in Kavanagh's collection, "Portraits," which Donald Davie has justly referred to as «perhaps the finest reflection on American history by an Englishman." These Whitmanesque yet unmistakably Gurney poems take him beyond Gloucestershire and the Severn meadows and also beyond the trenches. Times Literary Supplement, January 3, 1986.

43.

TOM PAULIN

Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State With hindsight we can see that the mansion-house of liberty passage in Areo-

pagitica reads like an anticipation of Whitman's «Song of Myself": Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving, A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming. This is the city and I am one of the citizens, Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools, The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.

. Tom Paulin

[69]

The Whitman who hears «all sounds running together, combined, fused or following" is true to the social relatedness of different individual activities which Milton sings in the prose. Especially at the close- «others as fast reading, trying all things" - Milton sounds uncannily like Whitman democratically trying to pack every last rapid action in. Both poets share an ecstatic primitivism ((Smile 0 voluptuous cool-breath'd earth!") that can also be a figure for the procreant urge of the market: «millions of spinning worms, / That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk." However, Milton's commitment to the busy hum of mercantile republics is not entirely wholehearted, for he assigns this vision of productive «natural" labour to Comus, the tempter.... Milton's egotism, like Whitman's, has a generous, wonderfully innocent optimism that springs from their absolute confidence in the liberating possibilities of the free individual conscience. By comparing Milton and Whitman, we start to see the republican poetics that structure the prose. Whitman asserts, «Not words of routine this song of mine," and Milton is constantly striving to break down. inert routines in order to free the imagination from «linen decency," «a gross confirming stupidity, a stark and dead congealment." To adapt Hazlitt's terms, the «momentum" and «elasticity" of this republican visionary force which confidently insists that of all governments a Commonwealth aims «most to make the people flourishing, virtuous, noble and high-spirited." It seems appropriate that scholars working in the United States should invite readers congealed in the royalist kitsch of present-day Britain to remember and admire this great servant of human liberty. (London: Faber, 1991), 29-31.

[70]

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.:'. .

"'.:::

.

~ ~.'

'

.

. FERNANDO ALEGRIA

Whitman in Spain and Latin America Jorge Luis Borges, an admirer but not a worshipper of Whitman, has said with typical irony: Almost everything written about Whitman is ruined by two persistent errors. One is the summary identifying of Whitman, the conscientious man ofletters, with Whitman the semi-divine hero of Leaves afGrass.. .. The other, the senseless adoption of the style and vocabulary of his poems, that is to say, the adoption of the very same amazing phenomenon which one wishes to explain. (Borges, 70) But the majority of persons who have written about Whitman in Spain and Latin America have simply identified the hero of "Song of Myself' with the man who created him. To them, Whitman achieved one of the great ambitions of his life: convincing the reader that his book and his person bear one single identity- that in saying "Camerado, this is no book, who touches this touches a man" he was not attempting a metaphor but demanding to be taken literally. HISPANIS WHITMANISTAS: WHITMAN'S GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARTi

JOSe Marti, the Cuban poet who introduced Whitman to Hispanic literature in 1877, laid the foundations for this glorification (see selection 1). So brilliantly

inspired was Marti's exegesis that no one dared contradict him; thus, Whitman was considered an apostle without blemish, the representative poet of the democratic genius of America. This image of a bard as the poet-prophet speaking for a chosen nation was not unfamiliar to the Latin American readers of Ruben Dario, Leopoldo Lugones, and Jose S. Chocano. Marti opens his essay on Whitman by quoting a newspaper report about Whitman's 1887 Lincoln lecture: "Last night he seemed a god, sitting in his red velvet chair, his hair completely white, his beard upon his breast, his brows like a thicket, his hand upon a cane." Marti then built upon this divine image to create a "muscular and angelic" bard: "All literate New York attended that luminous speech in religious silence, for its sudden grace notes, vibrant tones, hymnlike fugues and Olympian familiarity seemed at times the whispering of stars." The Nobel laureate Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, referring to Marti's essay, suggested that Dario owed much to him, Unamuno a great deal. Spain and Spanish America owed to him the poetic discovery of the United States. Through his travels in exile Marti incorporated the United States into Hispanic America and Spain better than any other Spanish-language writer.... Whitman came to us, and to all Spaniards, through Marti. (Jimenez, 33) Following Marti's lead, later Hispanic authors tended to take at face value Whitman's own' statements about his family and the Long Island surroundings of his youth. They idealized his ancestors and his legendary youthful years of "absorption" when the poet stored knowledge as the result of direct experience. They enumerated the positions he held; they emphasized the triumph of his bohemian inclinations over bureaucratic routines. His wanderings along Broadway, his passion for opera, his meanderings along the wharves, his bus rides and evenings spent in taverns with his worker-friends were all described as examples of Whitman's democratic and progressive spirit. His trip to New Orleans provided romance (as well as six phantom children). Whitman's activities as a nurse during the Civil War were described as an apostolate. His literary career was exalte.d as the struggle of an isolated poet against the power of a strong and prejudiced political establishment. Whitman was typically described as having suffered economic and physical hardships during his old age, all of which he overcame through extraordinary stoicism, aided by a small group of loyal friends. Despite this idealization, these biographical sketches have a peculiar significance which is difficult to explain. In them, the ghost of Whitman finds a language that creates a unity between his personality and his poetic hero. Never was Whitman more bohemian than in Spanish; never was he more prophetic than when shuffling centuries and sidereal spheres in the modernistic discourse of Dario. Who can make Whitman more apocalyptic than Lugones? And how can Whitman sound more proletarian than in Pablo Neruda's "Let the Woodcutter Awaken"? Every detail of Whitman's life, however insignificant and hackneyed, gains new life in the lyrical drive of Marti, in the metaphors of Amando Vasseur, [72]

WHITMAN IN SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA

in the avant-garde imagery of Luis Franco. "This man loves the world with the fire of Sappho," exclaims Marti. "He sees the world as a gigantic bed." Whitman's sea roars aggressively in the paraphrases of Leon Felipe, while in Armando Donoso's descriptions it pounds with philosophic resonance. Leaves of Grass is a patriotic book for Torres-Rloseco, a social document for Gilberto Freyre, a demiurgic text for Miguel de Unamuno. However, to consider all commentary on Whitman that derives from Marti as simply lyrical fireworks would be a mistake. Marti characterizes Whitman's poetry as representative of a society based on freedom to work and on the liberty to develop spiritually. Whitman's poetry is one «of inclusiveness and faith, soothing and solemn." Its greatness derives from its desire to serve man's constant struggle for liberty: "Whitman sings what the working masses aspire to sing and brings into an atmosphere of collective endeavor the exercise of an art which could not prosper in any other way." This idea of the necessary freedom of man leads the poet to organize an optimistic philosophical system. Consider the conception of death in the poem honoring Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Nature, Marti says, accompanies the dead man across the States. The stars had announced the death of the hero, the clouds had darkened, the thrush sang its sad song in the swamps: "When the poem is finished it seems all Earth has been clothed in black and the dead man has covered it from sea to sea." On the threshold of death the secret visions of the poet become illuminated; then Whitmanian lovers can reintegrate themselves into eternity. This harmonious relationship between the concepts of life and death is a basic link in Whitman's dialectic chain. His understanding of the universe is based on the Hegelian principle of the harmony of opposites, and, for Marti, the poet is the unifying cosmos: "His duty is to create and his ,creation shares in the divine, so that when Whitman intones the (Song of Myself' he is expressing the identity of the Universe." Whitman's sensuality so compellingly draws Marti's attention that most modernist and postmodernist critics an.d poets following in his footsteps could not avoid being influenced. Marti describes the sensual enjoyment that Whitman experiences in the contemplation and experience of his own body and proceeds to formulate a theory of autoeroticism quite similar to ideas expressed by European and North American readers: Why be surprised then if the poet chooses to sing the body as much as the soul exalting the beauty of the spirit and the disturbing presence of matter? ... He depicts truth as a frantic lover who invades his body and, eager to possess him, rids him of his clothes.... Such language has seemed lascivious to some who are incapable of understanding its grandeur.... He gives himself to the atmosphere like a tremulous bridegroom. It must be emphasized that for Marti-and later on, for Neruda and BorgesWhitman's sensuality is an essential derivative of his pantheistic ideas. Love is one of the bonds that unites humans with God and with nature. Fernando Alegria

[73]

Montoliu, Donoso, and Others Many Hispanic critics and poets developed Marti's ideas, among them Gomez Carrillo, Perez Jorba, Jaime Brossa, Angel Guerra, Cebria Montoliu, Armando Donoso, Luis Franco, and Jose Gabriel. Of these-all writing during the first half of the twentieth century-Montoliu, Donoso, and Gabriel are the most interesting. Montoliu's book Walt Whitman, L'home i sa tasca (1913), in Catalan (later translated in Argentina into Spanish as Walt Whitman, el hombre y su obra [1943]), may be considered the first systematic study of Whitman published in the Hispanic world (see selection 3). The Catalan critic states that his purpose is to vindicate the memory of a poet who was denied recognition in his country even after being accepted in Europe as one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century. Montoliu's main sources of information were Specimen Days, "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," and Richard Maurice Bucke's Walt Whitman; from these he could draw only an idealized image. However, he offers historical comments that have influenced Hispanic readers. He describes the failure of the first edition of Leaves ofGrass, and he offers a fine analysis of Emerson's letter to Whitman. Montoliu explains why the transcendentalists accepted Whitman and proclaimed his genius, even though Emerson used harsh words to criticize the "excessive crudity" of some sexual passages in Leaves of Grass. Analyzing the Civil War, Montoliu describes Lincoln's influence upon Whitman. He emphasizes the strong support Whitman received from British writers such as William Michael Rossetti, and he notes how Whitman's popularity grew in England. Montoliu remains faithful to Whitman's autobiographical writings and to the idealization of his life which the poet himself promoted. He does not tamper with historical facts; rather, the facts that reached him are deeply glorified. He deals with Whitman's metaphysics, politics, aesthetics, and, more warily, his prosody. In an appendix, he candidly discusses Whitman's sexual attitudes. Montoliu also published the first Hispanic translations of poems from Leaves of Grass (1909), but in Catalan, not Spanish. However, in the same year as Montoliu's book, there also appeared a brilliant essay on Whitman's catalogs by the great Spanish scholar Miguel de Unamuno, the rector of the University of Salamanca: "El canto adanico," later published in his EI espejo de la muerte (1930; see selection 4). It was a clever and lyric justification of Whitman's use of enumerations. Unamuno discovered Leaves of Grass in 1906 during a visit to America, and he adopted Whitman's disregard of traditional poetic diction and musicality, as his poem "Credo poetico" shows. He even imitated Whitman's rhythmic liberties in "El Cristo de Velasquez" (1920) and remained faithful to Whitman during the rest of his life, admiring his indifference to contradictions and his bold assertion of himself in his poems. Not long after the appearance of Montoliu's book and Unamuno's essay, the Chilean critic Armando Donoso published two articles on Whitman that attempted to discover the roots of his philosophy outside of traditional American patriotism. Donoso was an unusual social thinker himself. As a literary critic he [74]

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fostered avant-garde tendencies; as an editorialist for the venerable Chilean daily EI Mercurio he defended extremely conservative causes. A man of culture and sensibility, he had been educated in Germany and lived in Spain, where he published an anthology of the most advanced Chilean poetry and an excellent scholarly book on Goethe. What is particularly appealing in Donoso's writing on Whitman is that, drawing away from the usual idealization of ((Song of Myself," he searches for the philosophical and religious roots underlying the poet's ideas. ((Walt Whitman, born into an admirable family (his father was a working man and his mother a fine Dutch woman, a Quaker), inherited that spiritual strength which comes only from a life full of hardships leading towards the highest apostolates" (Donoso, 199). From the Quakers he inherited his love of nature, a love which is not expressed in the form of a ((sickly mysticism" but as an exaltation of his strong personality, leading him to identify with the universe and to define himself as a cosmos. Whitman's spirituality involved an idea of limitless progress, which Donoso links to Emerson's idea of the ((representative man" and to Nietzsche's Obermensch. Donoso believes that this ((superman" is contained in the very person of the poet and gains expression through Whitman's literary work. Donoso's greatest achievement may be his analysis of ((Drum-Taps," a section of Leaves of Grass which generally has had little attraction for Hispanic readers. The presence ofWhitman on the battlefront is not just a simple humanitarian act, Donoso believes. Rather, Whitman is giving expression to ((the warlike happiness which exalts him to an apocalyptic hate and holy fire which overflows the poems of (Drum-Taps.'" On the other hand, in Lincoln's death Whitman ((finds the poetic motive that allows him to find a universal significance to the feelings that the Civil War had aroused in him" (Donoso, 203, 205). During the years of the First World War, Hispanic Whitmanism went through a period of lethargy, even though Whitman's name was mentioned repeatedly in literary manifestos and articles dealing with the theory and the poetry of the avant-garde. In 1922 the Chilean critic and poet A. Torres-Rioseco broke this silence by publishing a volume of criticism, biography, and translations which initiated a renewed impulse in the Whitmanist movement. Torres-Rioseco's book is a mixture of idealization and bombastic contradictory statements: Studied as man, Walt Whitman proves to be proud and egotistical. The Horace Traubels and the O'Connors with their bowing and scraping made him believe that he was the greatest man of all times.... At times, reading his biography, it seems easy to believe that Walt was an astute man.... Walt Whitman was very fond of pontificating and discussing topics about which he didn't have the slightest notion.... Nevertheless, his lyric work is a categorical denial of any superficial misunderstanding of his personality. (Torres-Rioseco, 54-55) Perhaps Torres-Rioseco initiated a trend. The Peruvian critic Luis A. Sanchez was no less bold in his surprising comparison between Whitman and Oscar Wilde in his volume Panorama de la literatura actual (1935): Fernando Alegria

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Wilde, in spite of everything, was less immoral than Queensberry and Whitman. Wilde was sociable, artistic, gentlemanly, beyond morality, comfortable, lovable, humorous, individualistic, optimistic. Whitman was unsociable but approachable, active, rude, laborious, shy, affirmative, prophetic, tumultuous, optimistic, without morals. . . . The sons of those who yesterday outlawed Leaves ofGrass are today founding Whitmanian societies.... (Sanchez, 61-62) Soon after Sanchez wrote these words the Cuban Jose A. Ramos attempted to contradict him. Ramos complained that some ill-informed critics were using the case of Whitman and Poe to blame the United States for having misunderstood and persecuted their greatest literary figures. Whitman was.not a man who coveted material advantages, said Ramos; his struggle against the bourgeois environment of his era was due to his own temperament, which impelled him to despise conventional institutions. The admiration that intellectuals such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Burroughs felt for Whitman proves that Whitman was never completely rejected by the literary circles of his time. As for the attitude of the reading public, Ramos notes that "from 1881 until his death in 1892, Walt Whitman lived on the income from the sale of his books" (Ramos, 76). Jose Gabriel, a Spaniard who was a nationalized Argentinean, reacted against the most obvious exaggerations of the Latin American Whitmanists when he published Walt Whitman, la voz democratica de America (Walt Whitman, the Democratic Voice ofAmerica) (1944). He set some family matters straight. Whitman, according to Gabriel, did nothing but share family obligations in supporting his brother Eddie, a congenital idiot, and his brother Jesse, who died in a mental institution. Then he refers to Whitman's "spiritual awkwardness, running parallel to his physical ungainliness." Of the youthful work, Gabriel's opinion is that Whitman was «young and naive; he also indulged in moralistic preaching that made his work mediocre. . . . His novel Franklin Evans is nothing more than a hygienic argument in favor of the temperance cause." His predilection for the opera exhibits «a certain bourgeois optimism,') the imprint of which is not difficult to find in his literary work. Whitman has a «superb image. But already Europeanized: Jehovah, Abraham, Moses, Jupiter.... The portrait of his old age already shows the mise-en-scene prepared by the poet himself." The image of Whitman, that of the «rough" who appears facing the title page of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, an image that was then almost unknown among Hispanic Americans (for whom he was always the old bearded poet), is «the image of a cowboy of the western plains" (Gabriel, 23, 30, 40-41). In dealing with the Civil War, Gabriel draws an interesting parallel with the Spanish Civil War (1936-1938), and thus Whitman's actions and the poems of Drum-Taps become filled with a clearly revolutionary elan. The great merit of Gabriel's essay lies in its restraint and) particularly, in the poetic passages that accompany each chapter) some of them direct translations from Leaves ofGrass meant to illustrate the facts narrated by the biographer.

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Whitman and Santayana Idealizing interpreters of Whitman's life and poetry might be held responsible for driving George Santayana to write his dubious attack against what he called «The Poetry of Barbarism" (1921). Santayana's piece provoked a spirited reaction among Latin American Whitmanists-particularly Jose Gabriel and Luis Franco - in sharp contrast to the favorable North American reaction, where Santayana's whimsical opinions on Leaves ofGrass were generally admired. Santayana may have been influenced by the journalistic criticism that bombarded the first edition of Leaves of Grass and by opinions of British writers like Swinburne, whose work Santayana read and admired during his years at Harvard (Santayana 1944, 201). Santayana may also have been inspired by the Guatemalan Enrique Gomez Carrillo, who wrote that shades of meaning are unknown to Whitman; psychological mysteries do not reach him; intellectual complications are foreign to him.... For him life levels all things with its unconscious force. He finds nothing despicable: neither vice, nor ugliness, nor crime. His universal sympathy recognizes no limits going from the Flesh to the Idea, from Good to Evil. (Carrillo, 22) 1 Santayana, a poet himself, was an admirer of classical tradition, indifferent to the vociferous clamor associated with Whitman's pronouncements, particularly among the early disciples of Futurismo and Marinetti. Trained as a philosopher, Santayana, like Unamuno, searched for poetic abstractions and symbols. He was shocked by Whitman's «lack of distinction, absence of beauty, confusion of ideas and incapacity to please permanently.... The order of his words, the procession of his images, reproduce the method of a rich, spontaneous, absolutely lazy fancy." In most poets this natural order is modified by regulating motives: «the thought," «the metrical art," «the echo of other poems in the memory" (Santayana 1921, 177-178). For Whitman, these conventional regulators do not exist: We find the swarms of men and objects rendered as they might strike the retina in a sort of waking dream. It is the most sincere possible confession of the lowest - I mean the most primitive - type of perception. All ancient poets are sophisticated in comparison and give proof of longer intellectual and moral training. Walt Whitman has gone back to the innocent style ofAdam, when the animals filed before -him one by one and he called each of them by its name. (177-178) 2

Santayana reduces Whitman to the size of an engaging «primitive" who had the faculty of understanding only «the elementary aspects of things" (Santayana 1921, 181). Whitman was not interested in their inner structure; his attitude was that of a person without knowledge of the uses of practical or theoretical interpretation: He basked in the sunshine of perception and wallowed in the stream of his own sensibility, as later at Camden in the shallows of his favorite brook. Even dur-

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ing the Civil War, when he heard the drum-taps so clearly, he could only gaze at the picturesque and terrible aspects of the struggle, and linger among the wounded day after day with a canine devotion; he could not be aroused either to clear thought or to positive action. The world has no inside for Whitman, according to Santayana: "This abundance of detail without organization, this wealth of perception without intelligence, and of imagination without taste, makes the singularity of Whitman's genius." Thus we must discover his qualities in his very defects: Whitman is interesting, even in moments when he is simply "grotesque or perverse." He has seen life not in contrast with an ideal but rather as an expression of more indeterminate and elemental forces than life itself, and therefore "the vulgar, in this cosmic setting, has appeared to him sublime" (180-181). Santayana concludes by analyzing Whitman's seldom-discussed political attitude. If Whitman is the poet of democracy, it is because "there is clearly some analogy between a mass of images without structure and the notion of an absolute democracy.... Surrounded by ugly things and common people, he felt himself happy, ecstatic, overflowing with a kind of patriarchal love." Whitman's only hero is his own self. As for Whitman's perfect man of the future, he "is to work with his hands, chanting the poems of some future Walt, some ideally democratic bard." With a premonition of Borges's modern irony, Santayana implies that the women of Whitman's utopia will be as much like the men as possible, and the men will be "vigorous, comfortable, sentimental, and irresponsible" (Santayana 1921, 181-183).

In a significant way, Santayana's Whitman is a poet not of the future but of the past: Whitman became "the prophet of a lost cause. That cause was lost, not merely when wealth and intelligence began to take shape in the American Commonwealth, but ... at the foundation of the world, when those laws of evolution were established which Whitman, like Rousseau, failed to understand" (Santayana 1921, 183). So Whitman does not represent "the tendencies of his country," nor does he attract the masses, but only the dilettanti whom he always despised. Santayana concludes that only "foreigners, who look for some grotesque expression of the genius of so young and prodigious a people," can consider him the spokesman for the United States. Feeling, perhaps, that he was being unfair in his general judgment on Whitman, Santayana added a rather condescending final note, suggesting that Whitman's appeal was to something more primitive and general than an ideal: "When the intellect is in abeyance, when we would 'turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self-contained,' when we are weary of conscience and of ambition, and would yield ourselves for a while to the dream of sense, Walt Whitman is a welcome companion" (186-187). Whitman's images, full of vigor· and radiance, direct and beautiful, are particularly attractive because they come "from a hideous and sordid environment" (187). They offer a sort of escape from conventional life and allow his readers to sink back com-

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fortably into "a lower level sense and instinct" (187). Santayana's words seem to indicate that Whitman's mysticism is no more than an excuse to act unintelligently, an effort to convince us that we are divine by remaining "imperfectly human" (187). Latin American admirers of Whitman foupd it difficult to sympathize with Santayana's snobbishness. What they detected in the Harvard philosopher's critique was his attempt to defend a pseudoaristocratic aestheticism against a powerful antibourgeois social attack. "America" for Whitman symbolized the transformation of an aggressively individualistic, materialistic system into a society of "comrades" in which spiritual values were as essential as material ones and where the concept of individuality was accepted as a factor of universal unity. Santayana, on the other hand, brought the full weight of his scholarly background in defense of a hierarchical, pragmatic establishment. He attempted to portray Whitman as the champion of a lost cause, a poet of the disap.pearing era of the pioneers, already surpassed by the pragmatism and intelligence of the American Commonwealth. Unfortunately, he seems to be referring to the political machinery organized at the turn of the century, so his measure of progress is heavily dependent on geopolitical dominance. It is instructive to compare the attitude of Eduardo Mallea, a distinguished Latin American novelist and essayist, with Santayana's scornful view of Whitman's ideology. Searching for the image of an individual who would embody the noblest qualities of the Argentine people, Mallea recalls ideas expressed by Whitman in his poem "Me Imperturbe": "Is that imperturbability an attitude, a pose? No, it is a form of being which can exist unmanifested, which can remain implicit in man, unknown but natural ..." (Mallea, 340). One of Mallea's characters in La Bahia de silencio (The Bay ofSilence) (1945) says, "The more I think of it I feel that there could be no other ideal possible for men than that of wishing to grow from the earth toward the sky like trees, unperturbable, sure of the sense of their growth. Without theoretical arguments about this or anything else. Do you recall the poem by Whitman, Walt Whitman?" (340). Jose Gabriel, too, felt that Santayana did not understand Whitman: "From his country he received the same old rebukes, whose echoes, less noisy but perhaps more passionate, are still present in the classical pettiness of Santayana, that Hispanic-Roman relic in America (personal talent included)" (Gabriel, 177). According to the Argentine Luis Franco, Santayana scorned Whitman's poetry because he found in it a lack of restraint and good taste, because he considered it irrational (although powerfully imaginative),. chaotic, too simple and primitive. Santayana believed that poetry could not limit itself to expressing a purely poetic impulse; it had, in addition, to be enriched by an objective content. Most poets, according to Santayana, capture only segments of the world, without accomplishing an intelligent coordination of their institutions. Franco, however, set out to prove that behind Whitman's sharp perception of concrete reality was a profound understanding of the unity of the universe: "Whitman is not a modernist poet,

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but a fundamentally modern spirit.... The greatness of Whitman's poetic art lies in the fact that the substance makes one forget the form, that, as in organic life, form and substance are undistinguishable.... The enlightened consciousness and the great boldness with which Whitman brought the necessities of modern man into poetry are so evident that it is difficult to imagine how Santayana could call him a primitive poet" (Franco, 232, 227). Franco, Gabriel, and other Hispanic Whitmanists are unanimous in condemning Santayana's prudishness. Santayana, they feel, was offended by Whitman's haste, his improvisations, and his confidence in intuitive powers.

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WHITMAN S INFLUENCE ON SPANISH AMERICAN POETRY

The role Whitman has in the development of contemporary Hispanic poetry can best be studied in relation to two movements: modernism and the avantgarde. One might say that Spanish American modernist poets did not really grasp the essence of Whitman's message. Whitman's voice often is present in their work, but seldom his spirit. To them, Whitman was mainly a legend. They knew only fragments of his work and those mostly through translations. They admired him for having dared to break away from England's traditions, and they thought of him as a Victor Hugo of the new world. Inspired by Marti, Ruben Dario wrote his famous sonnet to Whitman and then paid homage to him in. an article published by the Chilean newspaper La Epoca. Later on, he left testimony of his admiration for Whitman in his Autobiografia (1918) and in the prologue to Prosas profanas (1917). Following his example, other important figures in the modernist movement approached Leaves of Grass with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension: in Mexico, J. J. Tablada and Amado Nervo; in Peru, Jose S. Chocano (who melodramatically claimed, "Walt Whitman has the North, I have the South") and Alfredo Gonzalez Prada, who translated into Spanish "A Woman Waits for Me." In Argentina, Leopoldo Lugones praised the social struggles ofhis people in a free verse style echoing Whitman's. In Puerto Rico, Luis Llorena Torrens brought about radical literary changes by expressing his zest for life in poetic forms reminiscent ofWhitman. 3 Whitman's philosophical, religious, and political ideas were not really discovered until later, after the Mexican poet E. Gonzalez Martinez gave the coup de grace to modernism in his memorable sonnet "Tuercele el cuello al cisne" ("Wring the Swan's Neck") found in his Los senderos ocultos (1915). These postmodernists went beyond Whitman's verbalism to discover in his poetry much more than the romantic nationalism that had impressed Dario and Chocano. Armando Vasseur published the first anthology of Leaves ofGrass in Spanish translation and started a Whitmanist movement in Uruguay. He was joined by young poets of high merit such as Sabat Ercasty and Parra del Riego. Then, numerous disciples appeared in Argentina: Luis Franco, Gonzalez Tunon, and Ezequiel Martinez Estrada (who wrote in his 1929 poem «Walt Whitman": "I will follow [80]

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your trail with the zeal of the hound, / among the rhythmic stars or the earthmolded human, / wherever you are now repeating, Walt Whitman, / the autochthonous canticles of your iron land"). Antonio Arraiz began a Whitmanist trend in Venezuela with the publication of Aspero (1924). Chile also awakened to the Whitman call when the Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral paraphrased sections of Leaves of Grass in her masterful "Motivos del barro," found in her Desolaci6n (1945).

During the years of the First World War, Spanish American poets turned away from social themes and immersed themselves in the experimentation promoted by schools such as creationism and surrealism. Lautreamont and Rimbaud - and Apollinaire, Reverdy, and Breton, their most famous contemporaries - became the supreme masters. Once the obsession to experiment died down, however, Spanish American avant-garde poets began their return to realism and found their way back to Whitman. After World War I, the poets belonging to the socalled Generation of 1895 absorbed Leaves of Grass with enthusiasm. During the Spanish Civil War, some of these poets praised the heroism of the antifascist fighters in a tone clearly akin to Whitman's. Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo in Latin America and Leon Felipe, Garcia Lorca, and Jorge Guillen in Spain are the leading examples of such a trend. Felipe captured the tone of querulous identification when he said, "And so what if I call myself Walt Whitman? I have justified this poet of Democracy, I have extended him and I have contradicted him" (Felipe, 18; see selection 5). Lorca was as fervent an admirer of Whitman as Felipe and turned him into a cosmic and mythical figure in "Oda a Walt Whitman," which he wrote while in New York in 1929-1930, but unlike Felipe, he never lost his own identity, never melted into Whitman, and remained faithful to traditional means of expression and to Spanish subjects. As a homosexual, Lorca also was one of the first poets to directly address Whitman's homosexuality. Jorge Guillen had no such reason for admiring Whitman. In his Cantico, the first edition of which appeared in Madrid in 1928, he sang with elegance and transparent clarity-in a form closer to Valery than to Whitman - his sense of wonder before all forms of life, the mystery of the physical world, the happiness of merely existing; in short, he expressed a pantheistic vision of the world, which he shared with Whitman (see selection 8). Like Whitman, during the greater part of his career he kept enriching the same collection of poems, his Cantico, his hymn to Universal Life, which went through four constantly revised editions. A slightly younger poet, Rafael Alberti, also fell under Whitman's spell, but he was attracted by the social rather than by the cosmic themes of Leaves of Grass, and thus he wrote in "Siervos": "I send you a greeting / and I call you comrades." The poets who raised their voices during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime were similarly often inspired by Whitman, notably Antonio Machado and later Gabriel Celaya (the pseudonym of Rafael Mugica, an engineer), who occasionally resorted to Whitman's technique of enumerations. I will turn now to a more detailed and specific account of Whitman's influence on the poetry of Hispanic America during the twentieth century, considering the Fernando Alegria

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works of Dario, Lugones, Vasseur, Sabat, Neruda, Mistral, Rokha, and Huidobro. This is by no means an exhaustive list, however, for many other poets from Spanish American countries were followers of Whitman: in Venezuela, Jacinto Fombona Pachano, author of "Un alerta para Abraham Lincoln" (Las torres desprevenidas, Caracas, 1940); in Guatemala, Melvin Rene Barahona ("Listen, Walt Whitman") and Pedro Mir (Contracanto a Walt Whitman, Canto a nosotros mismos, 1952); in Nicaragua, Alfredo Cardona Peiia (Los jardines amantas, Mexico, 1952), Ernesto Cardenal, and Jose Coronel Urtecho. Ruben Dario Ruben Dario probably did not know Whitman's work before the publication of Azul. His first contact with Whitman's poetry came indirectly, through three articles that fell into his hands when Azul was already partially published in newspapers and magazines in Chile and Central America. The first edition of Azul (1888) does not include his poem to Whitman. This sonnet and other «Medallions" were added by Dario in the second edition of his book in 1890 (see selection 2). It is not known when Dario wrote his sonnet to Whitman. In his book Revelaciones intimas de Ruben Dario (1925), Maximo Soto Hall says that some of Dario's sonnets in Azul- «Catulle Mendes," «Whitman," and «J. J. Palma" -were written in 1890 while Dario was in Guatemala. Although this is plausible (the second edition of Azul did appear in that country), it could also be that Dario wrote them in 1889 during his sojourn in El Salvador. Moreover, in his book A. de Gilbert- hastily written in Sonsonate, El Salvador, as a lyric testimony of grief at the death of Pedro Balmaceda Toro, the son of Chilean president J. M. Balmaceda-Dario makes a surprising reference to Whitman. «My friend," says Dario, referring to Balmaceda,

was proud of knowing the Araucanian language and he enjoyed narrating many quaint anecdotes about the sons of «Untamed Arauco." He used to tell that if they had something to ask of the head of the republic, they would go to Santiago dressed in their strange costumes and never took off their hats to anything or anyone, just as the Yankee prophet Walt Whitman says he does. (Dario 1927,361-362)

In 1889, also in El Salvador, Dario wrote the prologue for Narciso Tondreau's book Asonantes, and again he mentioned Whitman's name, this time in regard to metrical experiments which he judged of particular interest: «Some poets have attempted to introduce the Greek and Latin hexameters into Spanish. At the present time in Italy, Giosue Carducci is trying to popularize the Spanish ballad and the Yankee prophet Walt Whitman repeats the Hebrew versicle in English" (Dario 1934,290).

Dario's admiration for Whitman had its limitations, however; he was careful to point out his own aristocratic preferences in contrast to Whitman's populism: «If there is poetry in our America, it will be found in ancient things: in Palenke

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and Utathin, in the legendary Indian, and in the sensual, refined Inca, in the great Montezuma of the golden chair. The rest is yours, democrat Walt Whitman" (Dario 1945, 606-607). In El viaje'a Nicaragua e historia de mis libros (1919) Dario reiterates this idea: "But abominating democracy, fatal to poets - regardless of what Whitman may think - I look toward the past, toward the ancient mythologies and their splendid stories" (Dario 1919, 188). Dario was, of course, an admirer and a follower of French Parnassianism and symbolism. His knowledge of Leaves ofGrass was at best superficial and probably indirect. When he addressed himself to the imperialistic attitude of the United States toward Latin America, he borrowed from Whitman a certain grandiloquence he thought adequate and proper. This explains his poems to Theodore Roosevelt. 4 Later, in his "Ode to Mitre," Dario would be more specific in his mention ofWhitman and would quote him directly (if not correctly): "Oh captain! Oh my captain! called Whitman." He even gave proof of his attachment to Whit~an: "One morning, after spending the night without sleep, Alejandro Sawa brought Charles Morice, the critic of the symbolists, to my hotel. ... He found a few books on my table, among them a Walt Whitman with which he was not acquainted" (Dario 1977, 3-6). Admiring Whitman as he did, why did Dario not include him among his Los Raros (1896)? He did include Edgar Allan Poe. He admired both, but Poe, an incarnation of French decadence and a bohemian hero, lost in the midst of a prosaic, mechanistic civilization, was his brother, so he exalted his poetry as a model of sensitivity and refinement for Spanish American young poets (Englekirk, 181-182). In Whitman, Dario admired the iconoclast, the reformer, the dynamic pioneer, the defender of the sacred right to remain an individual isolated in the world of his own artistic creation. "I do not have a literature (of mine' to show the way to others, as a great critic has expressed," said Dario; ('my literature is deeply rooted in me; he who servilely follows my footsteps will lose his personal wealth and, either page or slave, will never be able to hide his brand or his livery" (Dario 1977, 179).

Leopoldo Lugones One of the earliest examples of Whitman's influence in Spanish American poetry is Las montafias del oro, the first book by the Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones, published in 1897. In time, Lugones would change radically; his revolutionary inspiration gave way to a lofty rhetoric in which the sensual tones of French decadentism mixed freely with epic descriptions of the Argentine land. Reading the story of his life, it is not difficult to explain why the young Lugones was more convincing than Dario in expressing his admiration for Whitman. In the midst of a bitter struggle against critics who could not condone his poetic experiments and his revolutionary pronouncements, disillusioned by the apathy of the public, Lugones found a new source of energy in the writings of the great rebels of his time: Nietzsche, Bakunin, Tolstoy, Zola. He sacrificed his economic welfare and went

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on waging an implacable war against conservative reaction. Commenting on Lugones's line, "And I decided to put myself on the side of the stars," Pedro Miguel Obligado has said: It is a profession of faith, and in order to be loyal to it during all his life, the author became a poet-hero. He did not like the poetry of those who imitated him, nor did he desire followers whose ideas might limit his freedom. He longed to be spiritually alone, like Leonardo whom he venerated so much, "in order to be himself," although it might cost him the loss of his best friends, this disposition to correct himself, to change ifhe thought it was his duty to change, was one of the norms which he imposed on his conscience. (Obligado, 16) At the onset of his literary career Lugones searched for a definition of his personality and for the purpose of his art in the realm of history and in the critical evaluation of the aesthetic systems of the past. Las montafias del oro is a poem written with a cosmic vision of the world and in the biblical tone that readers identify with Whitman's. The language appears to be poetic prose, but since Lugones's sentences are rhythmical and separated by hyphens, they can be considered free verse. As in "Song of Myself," the Whitmanian "I" also acquires in Lugones's discourse a biblical resonance because of the prophetic quality of the sentences it introduces. Also, like Whitman, Lugones uses enumerations in a cumulative, catalog-like form. In the introduction to his book, Lugones names the writers who best represent his ideal conception of the poet: Homer, Dante, Hugo, and Whitman. "The"poet is the star of his own exile - he has his head next to God - but his flesh is the fruit of the cosmic mud of life." He then says: Whitman sings a song serenely noble. Whitman is the glorious artisan of the oak, He adores life that springs forth from the harvest, The great love that smooths the flanks of a female. And all that is power, creation, universe, Weighs upon the huge vertebrae of his verse. (Lugones, 55-56) Although Lugones's pantheistic doctrine is usually expressed in rather naive terms, the reader senses the existence of a certain bond between him and Whitman: It is an eternal miracle of faith. That which is fecund Or luminous, or beautiful-love, star, roseCertifies the ruling of a mysterious law Which combines the scheme of destinies, and draws Together the efforts of everything that is born Upon an eternal light which performs and thinks As the clump of muscles of an immense right. (Lugones, 57)

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Lugones singles out the "democratic dynamism" of the United States as an ideal for Latin Americans to follow. His vocabulary then becomes reminiscent of Whitman's in phrases like "he found the fraternal dogmas on new altars" and "God has said words to the leaves of grass: P€ople of the New World, you are the great reserve of the Future" (57- 59). In the first section of his book, Lugones includes an "Ode to Nakedness" in which he displays a strong sensualism obviously rooted in "Song of Myself": ... and wailing with love under the rustic virility of my beard, upon the violets that anoint it, squeezing its blue blood on its noble hair, my love grows pale like a big, naked lily in the night. Other lines in this and other poems bring to memory the lyric sensuality of "Calamus" (Lugones, 62). In the second section of the book, however, Lugones returns to descriptive prose. The third part, called ((Hymn to the Towers," is without doubt the most influenced by Whitman. Lugones attempts an epic evocation of human history in which the towers are symbols of humanity's great conquests. In the tenth section Lugones mentions Emerson and, in the eleventh, Whitman and Poe. The language is biblical, and the rhythmical repetition and the abundance of images create effects of intense poetic brilliance. Lugones seems to be adapting into Spanish Whitman's recitative form (Lugones, 93, 96-97). Growing old, Lugones withdrew from social and political struggles and joined the comfortable circle of literary salons. One section of his book Los crepusculos del jardin (Twilights) (1926), however, still recalls the Whitmanism of his youth, the series of sonnets entitled "The Twelve Pleasures." Once again one finds in them an intense sensuality, an erotic imagination, and a tender melancholy. In Las horas doradas (The Golden Hours) (1922), there are two poems - "Triumphant Clearness" and "Last Roses" - in which Lugones attempts to express a Whitmanian metaphysical vision of nature. In these poems, he tries to capture moments of perfect balance between humans and nature, a mystic unity that demands a poetic expression of deep simplicity. The pantheism is again lyrical and nostalgic. Poets such as Whitman and Gabriela Mistral have successfully expressed this idea of metaphysical continuity- Whitman willing himself to the grass, Mistral to the dust of the road, to be reborn in nature. Lugones, like other poets of modernist romanticism, conceives such a process as a mere literary metaphor without philosophical content. Lugones's Whitmanism is reduced, then, to a heartfelt admiration in his initial book Las montaflas del oro and to isolated echoes throughout his poetic work. But it is fair to say that Lugones owes to Whitman his enumerative style used at times in the form of rhythmic prose, at times in rhymed poetry, as well as his type of optimistic, healthful sensualism endowed with deep pantheistic resonances.

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Armando Vasseur To the Uruguayan Armando Vasseur we owe the first anthological translation of Leaves ofGrass into Spanish, Rojas de hierba (1912). The first section of his book Cantos augurales (1904), entitled "Epic of the Abyss," is inscribed: "To the memory of Walt Whitman, rhapsodist of democracy." The third part, dedicated to Alma Fuerte, begins with a few resounding lines from Whitman quoted in Italian! These lines are taken from "To Him That Was Crucified" and, because they appear in Italian, indicate that Vasseur was not yet familiar with Leaves of Grass in the original. "Ode to a Couple of Introvert Women," the fourth section of the book, also carries an epigraph from Whitman in Italian, this time taken from "Song of the Redwood Tree": ((You womanhood divine, mistress and source of all, whence life and love and aught that comes from life and love." Vasseur's Cantos del nuevo mundo (Songs ofthe New World) (1907) begins with a symbol that was dear to Whitman-the tree symbolizing the creative impulse of life. Vasseur tries to trace the literary history of trees, including the trees of the Bible, of classical mythology, and of the Greco-Roman Golden Age. Then, in a cosmic flight through the centuries, he describes the American landscape, naming its typical trees in a three-page enumeration, after which wood is made transcendental and is viewed as the motivator of contemporary civilization. Because of its cumulative form, its glorification of matter and labor, and its Americanist ideal, this enumeration seems rooted in Leaves of Grass and apparently inspired by "A Song for Occupations": Let come forth from your entrails, opened by the axes of mountaineer LincoIns, the cross pieces of the bridges, stretched across rivers and mountain depths ... the millions of railroad links uniting the three Americas, and the internal framework of the electric trains, speeding in the great lightning of their time-tables, transporting the cargoes of harvests, the abundant catch from the fisheries, the firstlings of the flocks, the mine treasures, the works of art, the scientific discoveries, the languages, the ideas, the wealth and loves of the voyagers. (Vasseur, 12) Vasseur continues his enumeration, accumulating material objects and striving to create a vision of modern industry and cultural life in great cities. In one of the most notable poems of the book, "La Athintida," Vasseur expresses his social utopianism, upholding as a basic idea the proposition of a perfect democracy. El vino de la sombra (1917) is one of Vasseur's greatest achievements. In it there is a composition which shows a clear Whitman influence, "El afilador" ("The Grinder"). Vasseur included "Sparkles from the Wheel" in his 1912 translation of Leaves ofGrass. Of the three elements that Whitman uses in his poem - the street scene and the grinder surrounded by children, the figure of the grinder himself, and the golden sparks symbolizing the magic of the day and the miracle of the worker creating life around him - only the first is lacking in Vasseur's poem. Although Whitman prefers to let facts express his dynamic conception of the world,

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Vasseur is more interested in the emotional content of the man and in his wandering life, aspects Whitman ignores.

Carlos Sabat Ercasty In 1917 Carlos Sabat Ercasty published Pantheos and established himself as the pioneer of Spanish American avant-garde poetry and the precursor of the great social poets who began writing around 1920. He was not an imitator of Whitman but-like Vasseur, and later Neruda and Leon Felipe-he was a continuator and apostle of his message. Sabat confronted the great enigma of the universe with a metaphysical creed rooted in Hindu philosophy. Federico de Onis describes his poetry as «characterized by its strength and abundance, by the courage with which he confronts the great human themes: man, time, sea, life. In free form, which has something of the biblical verse and of Walt Whitman's poetry, he sings his exuberant, vital, cosmic optimism at the top of his voice" (Onis, 783). In poems such as «Urania," Sabat struggles to express his «cosmic consciousness." «In the world, the sidereal trace of my life still persists, when all possible lives circulated in the cosmic desire for God" (Sabat 1917, 41-42). From a cosmic vision he moves to the consideration of his own body, and his words echo «Song of Myself," where Whitman writes, I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I am an encloser of things to be. My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs, On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps, All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount. (LG, 80-81) Sabat writes: When I inquire from my flesh and my bones and my blood, I have the certainty that during innumerable cycles, I wandered in remote zones of space ... I know that in those stars is already reliving my distant sons' flesh, and that of friends of other cycles ... My eyes contemplated other stars and other men and other flora and fauna and other mountains and harmonies ... My soul is a celestial traveller! (44-46) In one of his Poems of Man, Sabat addresses the question of identity; paraphrasing Whitman, he states that his body is the product of centuries of preparation and that his life reflects the cosmic plan of creation encompassing the energy and dynamism of the worlds. Compare, for example, Sabat's poem that begins «It

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is night time" with Whitman's "Night on the Prairies." In Sabat's poem "The Tree," there is a reiteration of a pantheistic, dynamic idea related to a «cosmic plan" symbolized by the structure of a tree (Sabat 1917,45, 56-57). A similar idea served Whitman as a basis for the «organic" plan of Leaves of Grass, also elaborated in «Song of the Redwood Tree." In the climax of his poem, Whitman's tree speaks directly to humans, describing the qualities of the race that will build abetter world. In Sabat's poem, the tree also assumes this prophetic role. For both poets the tree, imperturbable to the passage of time, is the witness to the gestation of life and the symbol of immortality in this world. Once Sabat learned Whitman's ideology, he explained it in his own words, without specific references. In «The Beginning," «Further," and «The Hero and the Road," Sabat offers a synthesis, admirable for its lyrical beauty and clarity, of the philosophical ideas that are the foundation of Pantheos, and Whitman is very much present: ('America! The poets of the future will be the verb of the race which will give concrete form to your immo.rtal being and will orient your eternally renewed action" (Sabat 1917, 119). Just as Whitman's descriptions of nature are usually activated by touches of unequivocal sensuality, the erotic enters Sabat's pantheistic poetry through images in which sea, air, sun, and the human body anxiously seek to be fused in an embrace which symbolizes the unity of all created. In Libro del mar (Book of the Sea) (1922), Sabat makes the ocean a symbol of creation; he uses images similar to Section 22 of ('Song of Myself' - "You sea! I resign myself to you also" (LG, 49) or poems such as "Elemental Drifts," "On the Beach at Night Alone'" and "With Husky-Haughty Lips, 0 Sea": Sensual sea, voluptuous, awesome. Bed of the sun. Desperate sex of the earth. Womb of life. The vertical noon penetrates your entrails And you roar with love like a mother, and break your large waves on the stones of all the shores of the world. (Sabat 1922,18-19) In this series of poems, Sabat adapts his poetic discourse to the subtle movements of the sea, from a description in which the ocean becomes a "cosmic uterus" and the "womb of life" to a subjective interpretation in which the sea takes on shapes that awaken erotic responses (18-19). Sabat ends with the sea becoming a symbol of the cosmic plan of the universe. 5 There is a unity of thought and poetic intuition between Whitman and Sabat, both striving to achieve a philosophical synthesis through the idea of the sea. Despite these similarities, there is an important difference between Whitman's and Sabat's poems. For Whitman, the sea is a cosmic symbol and a poetic motif, which allows him to evoke intimate past experiences; for Sabat, the ocean is invariably a symbol stripped of sentimental connotations, a metaphysical riddle [88]

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leading to a feeling of ecstasy which might reveal the mystery of life. Using the sea as a poetic element, Whitman wrote one of his most impassioned and intimate lyric poems, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," but the sea itself, in its unfathomable mystery, never awakened in him the metaphysical and philosophical depth of Sabat's Libro· del mar. Sabat Ercasty was a kindred spirit of Whitman rather than a disciple. Like Whitman, he was possessed by a feverish anxiety to discover God in nature and to unite himself with God in an ardent, amorous embrace. He believed, like 'Whitman, that America had found in his poetry the true expression of a unique utopia. Pablo Neruda

Of all Spanish-American poets, the Chilean Pablo Neruda is most often compared to Whitman, sometimes negatively. A London Times reviewer once criticized Neruda by comparing him to Whitman: "Senor Neruda's hoarse and strident tones are not hard to imitate. But it is difficult to imagine what purpose such concentrated shrillness and indignation serve, or to whom exactly such a book can be recommended; certainly were the rail splitter - Lincoln - to awake, he would make very little of this new Whitman." At first glance Whitman and Neruda seem to express a similar message in a surprisingly related form, but there is a great deal of optical and aural illusion in those similarities. They share certain rhetorical forms of speech, but between the two poets there is more than fifty years ofintense experimental literature, most ofit thoroughly absorbed by Neruda. Moreover, by the time he published Canto general (1950), Neruda had already become a militant member of the Communist Party. Neruda seldom expressed his indebtedness to Whitman, yet he left indications of his admiration. Speaking of Mayakovsky, he wrote that "the strength, the tenderness and fire of Mayakovsky make him the greatest example of contemporary poetry. Whitman would have adored him. Whitman would have heard his voices coming over the steppes, answering for the first time and through the years his great civic orations" (Neruda 1976, 396). In Canto general, Neruda names Whitman among the greatest literary figures of the United States and considers him with Lincoln as the representative of North American democracy. Nowhere, however, has he detailed his admiration for Whitman or elaborated on the relationship between his own poetry and Whitman's. The closest he came was in a 1966 interview conducted by Robert Bly, when he spoke in broad generalities: Whitman was a great teacher. Because what is Whitman? He was not only intensely conscious, but he was open-eyed! He had tremendous eyes to see everything ----:. he taught us to see things.... He had eyes opened to the world and he taught us about poetry and many other things. (Neruda 1967, 87) The first literary and ideological links between Neruda and Whitman become noticeable in the more mature work of Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth) (1935) and Canto general. Perhaps the most obvious similarity between the two poets is a sensualism which Whitman's critics have described as autoeroticism. It reFernando Alegria

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veals itself in Neruda's poem "Ritual de mis piernas" ("Ritual of My Legs") and in "Juntos nosotros" ("We Together"), both in Residencia en la tierra. Neruda seems to have been inspired particularly by Section 9 of "I Sing the Body Electric." But even though both poets describe the human body in autoerotic terms, the degree of sensualism is more intense in Neruda. After following Whitman's bare enumeration, Neruda rises to express a materialistic exaltation of his body, totally deprived of metaphysical implications. By emphasizing the realism of his description with a mixture of concrete detail and sexual metaphors, he succeeds in presenting his body as an independent creature, with a life of its own, vegetating in a purely sexual atmosphere where the solitary observation and examination of its organs seems the prelude to decay. In the last lines of his poem, Neruda assigns an unusual significance to his feet, which are, for him, the frontier between the world and himself, that which decisively separates his life from the "invincible and unfriendly" earth. The second volume ofResidencia contains two poems charged with organic eroticism and detailed physiological descriptions, "Materia nupcial" and "Agua sexual." Although Neruda's language may seem more metaphorical than Whitman's, the mention of human organs is equally direct in both poets. Neruda's phrase "un espeso rio de semen" (Neruda 1967, 231) recalls Whitman's image of semen in his poem «From Pent-up Aching Rivers": «From pent-up aching rivers, / From that of myself without which I were nothing" (LG, 91). Neruda's autoeroticism disappeared in Canto general. Neruda liberated himself from morbidness, and references to sex take the form of remote and isolated memories from younger years. He accomplishes this change by applying his metaphors to the American environment to discover the intrinsic unity between humans and the world that surrounds them. Whitman endows nature with sexual power because he makes nature human in the process of identifying himself with it. Neruda, on the other hand, sees nature an opposite sex which, as the object of his love, he must conquer and possess. Neruda's struggle to re-create the American landscape is both epic and lyric, epic because he is living the experience of the Spanish American man defending himself against physical forces much superior to his own, and lyric because in this struggle he cannot fail to appreciate the tragic beauty of his enemy and glorify it romantically. Even though Whitman and Neruda personalize nature in their poems by means of sexual metaphors, they differ in their aims. Whitman is inspired by a pantheistic ideal, Neruda by dynamic materialism. One more theme links Whitman and Neruda: comradeship. Whitman transformed an earthy passion into a sentiment of universal significance, furthering love as a form of total unity and as the social basis for a true democracy. Neruda glorified friendship and comradeship. 6 But Neruda espoused a social creed of proletarian and revolutionary friendship in which the word «comrade" assumes an edge absent in Whitman's work. This is the subject of Neruda's «Oda a Walt Whitman," written in the 1950S (see selection 6). Nothing illustrates more graphically Neruda's love and admiration for Whitman than an anecdote told by Mexican writer Wilberto Canton in Posiciones (1950). [90]

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When Neruda and a group of friends were trying to start a new magazine in 1943, he was chosen to gather the necessary funds and to keep them ina safe place. At one meeting, someone suggested that Neruda should give a report and display the . funds already gathered, one thousand pesos. Neruda obliged. He mentioned that the money was kept among the pages of a handsome edition of Leaves of Grass. His friends s!lliled. Neruda brought the book and searched. He kept searching. Nothing. No matter how hard he tried, he could not find the one thousand pesos. "He ran to his desk, emptied the drawers, he rolled up the rug." Canton picked up the book and, 10 and behold, he found a notation: "See Bernal Diaz del Castillo, vol. II, p. 309." They all went to see the book, and on page 309 they found another direction: "See Santa Teresa, p. 120." And from Santa Teresa "they were referred to Milozc, to Cesar Vallejo, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aeschylus, Dante, Rilke, Plato, Tagore, Ercilla, Goethe, Dostoievski.... At last, on page 213 of Andersen's Tales," they found the treasure (quoted in Alegria, 334). This practical joke has given us the opportunity to know what books Neruda kept with him during his years of exile, but what we must never forget is that Neruda originally placed the one thousand pesos in Leaves ofGrass.

Gabriela Mistral Whitman has left his imprint on the work of Chilean Nobel laureate GabrieJa Mistral. A brief examination of her first book, Desolaci6n (1922), will convince the reader that her mysticism, steeped in Hindu tradition, is closely allied to Whitman's ideas. She believes in giving herself to be born again in a plural life of the spirit. There are as many popular roots in Mistral as there are in Whitman and Neruda; she shows equal devotion to working people, and she expresses the same ambition to make her work and her life a living gospel which must be carried directly to the masses. Mistral speaks for Latin American women in their struggle for social liberation in the same tone Whitman used when speaking for a new democracy in the United States. Like Whitman, she looks to mystic experiences for the secret of creation. Desolaci6n includes a prose poem in which the pantheist doctrine shines as purely and intensely as in the work of Whitman or Tagore. Whitman's «I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want. me again look for me under your boot-soles" (LG, 89) perhaps inspired Mistral's poem "A los ninos" ("To Children"), the fourth in "Motivos del barro" ("Themes in Clay"): "I'd rather be the dust with which you play in the country roads. Oppress me: I have been yours; undo me, for I made you; step on me, because I did not give you all the truth and all the beauty. Or, simply sing and run over me, so that I may kiss your beloved feet ..." (Mistral, 150). But it is not only mysticism that joins Mistral to Whitman. She also follows him in the glorification of motherhood. Few poets have expressed more eloquently than Whitman the creative function of woman, and few have defended with so much frankness and boldness the right of women to share with men the rights and responsibilities of social life. Mistral has said that "holiness in life beFernando Alegria

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gins with motherhood, which is, therefore, sacred. Let them feel the deep tenderness with which a woman who cares for children not her own considers the mothers of all the children in the world" (Mistral, 141). The Spanish critic Enrique DiezCanedo recalled Whitman's name to prove that Mistral's work embodies, better than any other contemporary poet's work, the soul of a woman: «For Desolaci6n is so much a woman's work that it is hardly a book. (Comrade,' says Whitman, (this is no book; whoever touches it, touches a man'" (Diez-Canedo, 300).

Pablo de Rokha and Vicente Huidobro Whitman's influence has been more direct on the work of Pablo de Rokha, another contemporary Chilean poet. Beginning with his early works, de ROkha has cultivated a proletarian and enumerative language to attack capitalistic society and to promote a socialistic revolution. His poetic vision is cosmic in a social and political sense, and a number of his themes derive directly from Whitman. «I am as old as the world," he states in Morfologia del espanto (Morphology of Fear) (1942), «as tall and wide as the world" (quoted in Alegria, 339). He speaks of himself as the embodiment of humanity; he reviews human history, identifying himself with the universe in the process of its centuries-old preparation. His image of cosmic creation is a surrealistic dramatization, and his mention of Whitman comes as a shock: «I am going to create the world, again, in seven days ... on the fifth I shall create a cow, Walt Whitman's widow ..." (de ROkha, 2). De ROkha's embrace, far from being a sentimental love of comrades, is a symbol of political solidarity within the proletarian revolution. De ROkha is, like Neruda, essentially materialistic, and pessimism runs as an undercurrent in his poetry. Whitman's popularity in Spanish America declined during the years of the First World War. It was then that the «isms" of the avant-garde burst forth. Whitman's name was temporarily forgotten and replaced by new artistic leaders: Apollinaire, Tzara, Reverdy, Breton, Aragon. The futurists made an attempt to reaffirm Whitman's ideas but ended up singing the virtues of fascism. Another Chilean poet, Vicente Huidobro, took over the Creationist movement, restating Emerson's ideas as expressed in «The Poet." Huidobro had already mentioned Emerson in his book Addn (1916), and in his famous poem «Altazor" (1931) he compared himself to Whitman: «Ah, ah, I am Altazor, the great poet.... / I'm the one who has seen all, who knows all the secrets, without being Walt Whitman, for I've never had a white beard like the pretty nurses and the frozen rivulets" (Huidobro 1981, 58). Huidobro's «Ars Poetica" is a more accurate reflection of his relationship to Whitman: Let the poem be like a key that opens a thousand doors. A leaf falls; something goes by flying; all that my eyes see is being created, and the listener's soul will be trembling. Invent new worlds and be careful with your word; adjectives that don't give life, kill.... [92]

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Why do poets sing to a rose? Make it bloom in your poem. Things under the sun live only for us. The poet is a small God. (Huidobro 1945, 42)

SPANISH TRANSLATIONS OF WHITMAN'S POETRY

The earliest Spanish translation ofWhitman's poetry (eighty-three poems) was the work of Armando Vasseur, the Uruguayan poet discussed earlier. Other translations of Leaves ofGrass may be more literal or even more poetic than Vasseur's, and two versions (Francisco Alexander's and Jorge Luis Borges's) 7 are certainly more complete, but Vasseur's translation is the breviary in which Hispanic poets learned their Whitman. Vasseur was thirty-five years old and a diplomatic representative of Uruguay in Spain when the first edition of his Walt Whitman, Poemas was published in Valencia in 1912.8 That he intended his translation to be a literary manifesto is borne out by the fact that he did not translate all of Leaves of Grass but only enough to stir the world of Spanish letters. Vasseur omitted approximately 750 lines of "Song of Myself," even though he knew Whitman's work was conceived in such a manner that any attempt to abridge it could be fatal. He was prone to making additions and deletions, he substituted a full metaphor for Whitman's "phrenological" terms, and at times he selected only a section of a poem whose real value was precisely in its contextual relation to the whole. Vasseur edited according to his personal taste. He was particularly attracted by Whitman's bits of formal and lyrical beauty; if something more philosophical came his way, he was inclined to omit it or shorten it considerably. In addition to indulging in a game of making new poems out of excerpts from Leaves ofGrass, Vasseur was not always accurate in his rendition of Whitman's vocabulary; he was usually defeated by the formidable mechanism of Whitman's present participles and gerunds. In Whitman's language, the present participle expresses, besides movement, an everlasting present which provides a transcendental quality to images which, described in different terms, would appear insignificant. The Spanish preterit that Vasseur used as a substitute truncates the action. Vasseur often added to Whitman's text in order to clarify it, but he used the occasion to display his own lyrical power. Like Bazalgette in France, he also toned down Whitman's sexual poems. Perhaps the influence of the Whitman legend determined Vasseur's revisions, even in a text which the poet himself changed a hundred times in order that it might conform with that legend he so ardently wished to maintain. There have been other translations as well. A. Torres-Rioseco's attempt resulted in a thoroughly harmonious text, authentically Whitmanist and unquestionably Spanish. Leon Felipe's 1941 translation, limited to "Song of Myself," suffered from a rhetorical emphasis superimposed on a poetry that is lyrically subdued, in spite of its powerful social message; however, this translation has enjoyed immense popularFernando Alegria

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ity in Spain and Spanish America because of Felipe's undeniable lyrical genius and his resounding Castilian eloquence. Concha Zardoya's 1946 translation, Obras Escogidas, includes 112 compositions from Leaves ofGrass (plus extracts from Specimen Days), translated with dynamism and a genuine Whitmanist tone. Though she avoided some ofVasseur's errors, she contributed some of her own, but on the whole she rendered the meaning satisfactorily and, above all, she translated all the important poems. So Spanish readers could at long last have a fairly complete idea of Whitman's Weltanschauung. Her handsomely bound translation was well received by the general public, was considered a successful critical revision of Vasseur's translation, and was reprinted several times. Leayes ofGrass was thus gradually acclimatized in Spain, and there was such a demand for it that translations multiplied. In 1971 a Catalan publisher brought out a complete translation by Francisco Alexander, which had originally appeared in Ecuador in 1953, and another Catalan publisher reprinted in 1972 a partial translation by Jorge Luis Borges, who on the whole followed Alexander's translation toward whom he recognized his debt in his preface. He was a great admirer of Whitman and, in his old age, could still recite some of his poems, which he knew by heart. Then in 1981 there appeared, this time in Madrid, two slim volumes of translations by the same author, Enrique Lopez Castellon, a professor at the free University of Madrid. The first volume contained Canto a mi mismo ("Song of Myself") and the second one El Calamo, Hijos de Adan ("Calamus," "Children of Adam"). The translations are close to the text and correct, the introductions well informed and sensible without any romantic or fanciful embellishments. ('Song of Myself" attracted still another translator in 1984, Mauro Armino, who, he claimed, tried to improve on his predecessors and probably did. His very clear introduction to Canto de mi mismo is based on James E. Miller's A Critical Guide to "Leaves ofGrass" and Miller's Whitman's "Song ofMyself": Origin, Growth, Meaning. In the same year, two very elegant minivolumes in a series entitled MiniVision came out, containing the translation of a selection from Leaves ofGrass by Alberto Manzano. All the longer poems were included, but there was no introduction. Finally, there appeared in 1978 the first volume of what was intended to be a complete bilingual edition of Leaves of Grass. The translator's ambition was very modest. Pablo Mane Garzon simply wanted his translation to be as literal as possible, leaving to the reader the responsibility of filling it out with the English text on the opposite page. Borges, in his own introduction, said that the translator had to choose between (i.e., free and arbitrary) interpretation, a resigned and modest rigor, or a compromise between the two. He personally chose the compromise, and Mane Garzon very humbly the rigor, yielding a pedagogically useful translation. The proliferation of translations denotes the growing appetite of the Spanishspeaking peoples for Leaves of Grass. Whitman appeared to them as a liberator both aesthetically and politically, though at first many critics thought that his ge-

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nius was alien to Latin minds and that his work would never be popular in Spain, even if he was the great American poet and the poet of the future.

NOTES

1. Their ideas are quite similar, and Carrillo's article, although it appeared in 1895, was written years before, perhaps in 1890 or 1891 judging by the introduction: "This article was written when Walt Whitman was still living, in answer to the sonnet ... of Ruben Dario's."

See Carrillo's Primeros estudios cosmopolitas (Madrid, 1920). 2. The last sentence of this quotation contains the leading motive inspiring Unamuno in his interpretation of Whitman in "Adamic Song" (selection 4). 3. For all sources, see Luis Llorena Torrens, Revista Iberoamericana (October 1947), 6-11. 4. See Ruben Dario, Cantos de vida y esperanza (Madrid, 1905) and El canto errante (Madrid: M. Perez Villavicencio, 1907). 5. See Sabat, El vuelo de la noche (Montevideo: Talleres Grafico de la Escuela: Industrial no. 1, 1925). Pablo Neruda later accomplished a philosophical synthesis of the sea symbolism in his masterpiece "The Great Ocean," in Canto general (1950; reprint, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1976). 6. See "T.L." in Pablo Neruda, Anillos, prosas de Pablo Neruda y de Tomas Lago (Santiago, Chile: Nascimento, 1926). See also "Tomas Lago," "Ruben Az6car," "Juvenico Valle," and "Diego Munoz," a collection of poems to his worker friends, ditchdiggers, shoemakers, sailors, fishermen, and miners; in "La tierra se llama Juan" ("Earth Is Called Juan"); in his poem-letters to "Miguel Otero Silva," "Rafael Alberti," and «Gonzalez Carballo"; in his elegies to Garcia Lorca, Rojas Jimenez, Silvestre Revueltas, and Miguel. Hernandez, all in Canto general. 7. See Francisco Alexander, Hojas de Hierba (Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1953); and Jorge Luis Borges, Hojas de Hierba (Buenos Aires: Juarez, 1969). 8. See the study of Vasseur's translation in Fernando Alegria, Walt Whitman en Hispanoamerica (Mexico: Ediciones Studium, 1954).

WORKS CITED

Alegria, Fernando. Walt Whitman en Hispanoamerica. Mexico: Ediciones Studium, 1954. Borges, Jorge Luis. Discusi6n. Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer, 1932. Carrillo, E. G6mez. Whitman y otras cr6nicas. Washington, D.C.: Uni6n Panamericana, 1950.

Dario, Ruben. El viaje a Nicaragua e historia de mis libros. Madrid: Editorial "Mundo latino," 1919. - - - . Obras de juventud. Santiago, Concepci6n, Chile: Nascimento, 1927. - - - . Obras desconocidas de R. D. Santiago: Prensas de la Univ. de Chile, 1934.

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- - - . Obras poeticas completas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1945. - - - . Poesia. Vol. 9. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977.

de Rokha, Pablo. Morfologia del espanto. Santiago de Chile: Editorial "Multitud," 1942. Diez-Canedo, Enrique. Letras de America. Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 1944. Donoso, Armando. "Walt Whitman." Cuba Contemporanea 7 (February 1915): 198-208. Englekirk, John Eugene. Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature. New York: Institutio de las Espanas en los Estados Unidos, 1934. Felipe, Leon. Walt Whitman: Canto a mi mismo. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1941. (With prologue in verse, 9- 21.) Franco, Luis. Walt Whitman. Buenos Aires: Ed. Americalee, 1945. Gabriel, Jose. Walt Whitman, la voz democratica de America. Montevideo: Ed. Ceibo, 1944. Huidobro, Vicente. Antologia. Santiago de Chile: Zig-Zag, 1945. - - - . Altazor. Madrid: Ediciones Editions, Catedra, 1981.

Jimenez, Juan Ramon. Espanoles de tres mundos. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1942. Lugones, Leopoldo. Las montanas del oro. Buenos Aires: Imp. J. A. Kern, 1897. Mallea, Eduardo. La Bahia de silencio. 2d ed. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1945. Marti, Jose. Norteamericanos. In Obras completas. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencas Sociales, 1975. Mistral, Gabriel~. Desolaci6n. Buenos Aires, 1945. Neruda, Pablo. Canto general. 1950. Reprint, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1976. - - - . Obras completas. 3d ed., Vol. 1. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1967.

Obligado, 'Pedro Miguel. In Leopoldo Lugones, Obras poeticas completas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1952. Onis, Federico de. Anthologia de la poesie espanola e hispanoamericana. Madrid: Imp. de la Lib., 1934. Ramos, Jose A. Panorama de la literatura norteamericana. Mexico: Botas, 1935. Sabat Ercasty, Carlos. Pantheos. Montevideo: O. M. Bertani, 1917. - - - . Libro del mar. Montevideo: Tallers graficos de la Escuela Industrial no. 1, 1922.

Sanchez, Luis A. Panorama de la literatura actual. 2d ed. Santiago de Chile: Ercilla, 1935. Santayana, George. "The Poetry of Barbarism." In Interpretations ofPoetry and Religion. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921, 166-216. - - - . Persons and Places. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944.

Torres-Rioseco, A. Walt Whitman. San Jose de Costa Rica: Ed. J. Garcia Monge, 1922. Vasseur, Armando. Cantos del nuevo mundo. Montevideo: A. Diaz, 1907.

1. JOSE MARTI

«The Poet Walt Whitman" "Last night he seemed a god, sitting in his red velvet chair, his hair completely white, his beard upon his breast, his brows like a thicket, his hand upon a cane." This is what a newspaper says today of the poet Walt Whitman, a man of seventy [96]

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whom the deeper critics - always in the minority- assign to an extraordinary place in the literature of his country and times. Only the holy books of antiquity, with their prophetic language and sturdy poetry, afford a doctrine comparable to that which is given out in grand, sacerdotal apothegms, like bursts of light, by this elderly poet, whose amazing book has been banned. And why not, since it is a natural book? Universities and Latin quotations have brought men to such a state as to recognize each other no longer. Instead of throwing themselves into mutual embrace, attracted by essential, eternal qualities, they draw apart, exchanging compliments like village gossips; and all because of chance differences. Like a pudding in a mold, a man takes on the shape of an energetic teacher or a book with which mere fortune or fashion has placed him in contact. Philosophical, religious, or literary schools set a uniform on a man's back, like livery on a footman's; men let themselves be branded like horses or bulls, and show the mark to the world. Therefore when they find themselves in the presence of a man who is naked, virginal, loving, sincere, and strong - a man who goes forward, who contends, who pulls on his oar-a man who, not letting himself be blinded by misfortune, reads a promise of final happiness in the balance and harmony of the world; when they find themselves in the presence of Walt Whitman the father-man, muscular and angelic, they flee as from their own consciences and refuse to recognize this specimen of fragrant, superior humanity as the true type of their species, which appears faded, standardized, and puppetlike. The newspaper says that yesterday, when another venerable man, Gladstone, had finished giving his rivals in Parliament a list of instructions concerning the rightfulness of granting Ireland a government of its own, he was like a mighty mastiff, standing erect and unchallenged in the midst ofthe crowd, which lay at his feet like a pack of bull terriers. So seems Whitman, with his "natural persons," with his "Nature without check with original energy," with his "myriads of youths, beautiful, gigantic," with his belief that «the smallest sprout shows there is really no death," with the impressive naming of peoples and races in his «Salut au Monde!," with his resolve that «knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself"; so seems Whitman, «he who does not say these things for a dollar"; he who says, «I am satisfied-I see, dance, laugh, sing"; he who has no professorship or pulpit or school. So seems he when compared to the spiritless poets and philosophers - philosophers of a detailor of a single aspect-sweetness-and-light poets, patterned poets, bookish poets, philosophical or literary figurines. You must study him, for while he is not a poet of the most refined taste, he is the most daring, inclusive, and uninhibited of his times. In his frame cottage, standing on the verge of poverty, he displays in a window a portrait of Victor Hugo, bordered in black. Emerson, whose words purify and uplift, used to put his arm on Whitman's shoulder and call him his friend. Tennyson, the kind of man who sees to the roots of things, sends affectionate messages to «the grand old man," from his oaken armchair in England. Robert Buchanan, the Englishman of

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the fiery words, cries out to the North Americans, "What can you know of literature ifyou let the old age ofyour colossal Walt Whitman run out.without the hon0rs it deserves?" "The truth is that reading him, although it causes amazement at first, leaves a delightful feeling of convalescence in the soul, which has been tormented by universal pettiness. He creates. his own grammar and logic. He reads in the eye of a bull and in the sap of a leaf." "The man who cleanses your house of dirt-that man is my brother!" His apparent irregularity, disconcerting at first, becomes later, except for brief moments of extraordinary clarity, the sublime order and composition with which mountain peaks loom against the horizon. He does not live in New York, his "beloved Manhattan," his "superb-faced" and "million:-footed" Manhattan, where he looks in whenever he wishes to sing a song of "what 1 behold Libertad." Cared for by "loving friends," since his books and lectures provide scarcely enough for his daily bread, he lives in a small house nestled in a pleasant country nook. From here, in his carriage drawn by the horses he loves, he goes out to see the "stout young men" at their virile diversions, the "comrades" who are not afraid to rub elbows with this iconoclast who wants to establish ((the institution of the dear love of comrades"; to view the fields they till, and the friends who pass by arm-in-arm, singing; and the sweethearts in couples, cheerful and. lively as partridges. He tells of this in his Calamus, a very strange book in which he sings of the love of friends: "Not the pageants of you, not your shifting tableaus ... repay me.... Not the processions in the streets, nor the bright windows with goods in them, Nor to converse with learn'd persons ; (but that as 1 pass through my Manhattan the eyes 1 meet offer me love); Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me." He is like the old men whom he announces at the end of his censored book, his Leaves of Grass: "I announce myriads of youths, beautiful, gigantic, sweet-blooded; 1 announce a race of wild and splendid old men." He lives in the country, where natural man, in the sunshine that tans his skin, plows the free earth with his tranquil horses; but not far from the hospitable, teeming city, with its life noises, its many occupations, its thousand-fold epic, the dust of its wheels, the smoke of the heavy-breathing factories, the sun looking down on it all, the workers who talk at lunch on piles of bricks, the ambulance that speeds along with the hero who has just fallen from a scaffold, the woman surprised in the midst of a crowd by the august pain of maternity. But yesterday Whitman came from the country to speak, before a gathering of loyal friends, an oration on another man of Nature, the great, gentle soul, the "great dead star of the West," Abraham Lincoln. All literate New York attended that luminous speech in religious silence, for its sudden grace notes, vibrant tones, hymnlike fugues, and Olympian familiarity seemed at times the whispering of stars. Those brought up in the Latin tradition, whether academic or French, could not perhaps understand that heroic humor. The free and decorous life of man on a new continent has created a wholesome, robust philosophy that is issuing forth upon the world in athletic epodes. For the largest number of free, indus[98]

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trious men that Earth ever witnessed, a poetry is required that is made of inclusiveness and faith, calming and solemn; poetry that rises, like the sun out of the sea, kindling the clouds, rimming the wave crests with fire, waking the tired flowers and the nests in the prolific forests of the shore. Pollen takes wing, birds exchange kisses; branches make ready; leaves seek the sun; all creation breathes music: with the language of the strong.light Whitman spoke of Lincoln. Perhaps one of the most beautiful products of contemporary poetry is the mystic threnody Whitman composed on the death of Lincoln. All Nature accompanies the sorrowful coffin on its road to the grave. The stars have predicted it. The clouds have been darkening for a month. In the swamp a grey-brown bird sings a song of desolation. With the thought and the knowledge of death the poet goes through the grieving fields as between two companions. With a musician's art he groups, .conceals, and reproduces these sad elements in a total twilight harmony. When the poem is done it seems all Earth has been clothed in black and the dead man has covered it from sea to sea. The clouds come, the veiled Moon announcing the catastrophe, the long wings of the grey-brown bird. It is much more beautiful, strange, and profound than Poe's "Raven." The poet carries a sprig of lilacs to the coffin. His whole work lies in that. Willows no longer weep over tombs; death is the harvest, the outlet, the great revealer. What is now in existence existed before and will exist again; oppositions and apparent griefs are blended in a solemn, celestial Springtime; a bone is a flower. Close at hand the sound of suns is heard, which with majestic movement seek their definitive station in space; life is a hymn; death is a hidden form of life; the sweat of the brow is holy, and intestinal fauna are holy; men should kiss one another's cheeks in passing; the living should embrace with ineffable love; they should love the grass, animals, air, sea, pain, death; suffering is less intense for souls possessed by love; life has no sorrows for him who understands its meaning soon enough; honey, light, and a kiss are of the same seed. In the darkness that shines peacefully like a dome crowded with stars; to soft music, over worlds asleep like dogs at its feet, a serene, enormous lilac tree rises. Each social category brings to literature its own mode of expression, in such fashion that the history of peoples could be told in the various phases of literature, with greater truth than in chronicles and annals. There can be no contradictions in Nature; the same human aspiration to find a perfect type of charm and beauty in love, during this existence and in the unknown life after death, shows that in the total life we must rejoicingly fit together the elements which in the portion of life we presently traverse seem disunited and hostile. A literature that announces and spreads the final, happy concert of apparent contradictions; a literature that, as a spontaneous counsel and instruction from Nature, proclaims in a single, overshadowing peace the oneness of the dogmas and rival passions that in the elemental state of peoples divide and plunge them into bloody conflict; a literature that in the timid spirit of men inculcates such a deep-rooted conviction of justice and

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definitive beauty that the privations and sordidness of existence will not discourage or embitter them; such a literature will not only reveal a social status closer to perfection than any known but also, felicitously joining reason to grace, will provide Humanity, eager for marvels and poetry, with the religion it has been confusedly awaiting ever since it realized the hollowness and insufficiency ofits old creeds. Who is so ignorant as to maintain that poetry is not indispensable to the peoples of the earth? There are persons of such mental myopia that they believe a fruit is finished after the rind. Poetry, which unites or severs, which fortifies or anguishes, which bears up souls or dashes them down, which gives men faith and comfort or takes them away, is more necessary to peoples than industry itself, since the latter bestows the means for subsisting, while poetry gives them desire and strength for life. Where would a society go that had lost the habit of thinking confidently about the meaning and scope of its acts? The best among them, those whom Nature has anointed with the holy desire for the future, would lose, in a silent and sorry annihilation, all incentive to surmount human ugliness; and the common herd, the people of appetites, the multitude, would procreate empty sons without godliness, and would raise to essential function those who ought to serve as mere instruments. With the b~stle of an always incomplete prosperity they would bemuse the irremediable melancholy of the soul, which takes pleasure only in beauty and sublimity. Other considerations to one side, freedom should be blessed, because its enjoyment inspires in modern man - who before its appearance was deprived of the calm, stimulation, and poetry ofexistence - the supreme peace and religious wellbeing that the world order produces in those who live in the pride and serenity of their free will. Look to the mountains, 0 poets whose puerile tears dampen deserted altars! You think religion lost because it is changing form over your heads. Arise, for you are the priests! Freedom is the definitive religion. And the poetry of freedom is the new form of worship. Such poetry calms and beautifies the present, deduces and illumines the future, explains the ineffable purpose and seductive goodness of the universe. Hark to what this industrious, satisfied people is singing; hark to Walt Whitman. His exercise of himself raises him into majesty, his tolerance into justice, his sense of order into happiness. He who lives in an aristocratic creed is an oyster in its shell, seeing only the prison that enfolds it, and believing, in the darkness, that this is the world. Freedom lends wings to an oyster. And what inside the shell seems a portentous strife becomes, in the light of day, the natural movement of fluids in the energetic pulse of the world. The world, to Walt Whitman, was always as it is today. It suffices that a thing exists for one to know that it must have existed before, and when its existence shall not be needed, it will not exist. That which exists no longer, that which is not seen, is proved by that which does exist and is seen; for everything is in the whole,

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one thing explaining the other; and when that which is now ceases to be, it will be proved in its turn by that which comes later. The infinitesimal collaborates toward the infinite, and every thing is in its place: a tortoise, an ox, birds, "winged purposes." It is as lucky to die as to be born, for the dead are alive; "No array of terms can say how much at peace I am about God and about death." He laughs at what they call dissolution, and he knows the amplitude of time. He accepts time absolutely. All is contained in his person; all of him is in everything else; where one sinks, he sinks; he is the tide, the influx and the efflux; why shall he not be proud of himself, since he feels he is a live and intelligent part of Nature? What does it matter to him ifhe return to the bosom from whence he came and, in the cool, moist earth, be converted into a useful plant, a beautiful flower? He will nourish men, after having loved them. His duty is to create; the atom that creates is of divine essence; the act in which one creates is exquisite and sacred. Convinced of the identity of the universe, he intones the "Song of Myself." Out of all things he weaves the song of himself: of the creeds that struggle and pass, of man who procreates and labors, of the animals that help him - ah, of the animals! "Not one kneels to another, nor is superior to any other, nor complains." He sees himself as heir to the world. Nothing is strange to him, and he takes all into account: the creeping snail, the ox that looks at him with its mysterious eyes, the priest who defends a part of the truth as though it were the whole truth. A man should open his arms and clasp all things to his heart, virtue the same as crime, dirtiness the same as cleanliness, ignorance the same as wisdom. He should fuse all things in his heart, as in a furnace; he should drop his white beard over all things. But - mark this well! - "We have had ducking and deprecating about enough." He rebukes the incredulous, the sophists, the garrulous; let them procreate instead of quarrelling, and they will add something to the world! Creating should be done with the same respect as a pious woman's who kisses the altar steps! He belongs to all castes, creeds, and professions, and in all of them finds justice and poetry. He gauges religions without anger, but he thinks the perfect religion is in Nature. Religion and life are in Nature. If there is a sick man, "Go," he says to the physician and the priest; "I will stay with him. I will open the windows, I will love him, I will speak softly to him. You shall see how he recovers; you are the words and the herbs, but I can do more than you, for I am love." The Creator is "The great Camerado, the lover true"; men are "cameradoes"; and the more they love and believe, the more they are worth, although anything that keeps its peace and its time is worth as much as any other. But let all see the world for themselves, since he, Walt Whitman, who feels within himself the whole of the world since its creation, knows by what the sun and open air teach him that a sunrise reveals more than the best book. He thinks of orbs, and desires women, feels himself possessed by universal, frenzied love. From scenes of creation and the trades of men he hears rising a concert of music to flood him with joy, and when he looks into a river at the moment when shops are closing and the setting sun ignites the water,

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he feels he has an appointment with the Creator; he recognizes that man is definitively good and from his head, reflected in the current, he sees spokes of light diverge. But what can give an idea of his vast, burning love? This man loves the world with the fire of Sappho. He sees the world as a gigantic bed. A bed is an altar to him. "I will prove illustrious," he says, "the words and ideas that men have prostituted with their stealth and false shame; I sing and consecrate what Egypt consecrated." One of the sources of his originality is the Herculean force with which he prostrates ideas, as though he were going to violate them, when in reality he is only going to give them a kiss, with the fervor of a saint. Another source is the material, brutal, fleshly form with which he expresses his most delicate idealities. Such language has seemed lascivious to some who are incapable of understanding its grandeur. There have been imbeciles who, when in Calamus he honors love among friends with the warmest images in the human tongue, have felt they saw, as they tittered like naughty school boys, a return to the ignoble yearning of Virgil for Cebetes and of Horace for Gyges and Lysciscus.. And when in Children of Adam he sings the divine sin, in pictures that dim the most glowing of the Song of Solomon, he trembles, he shrinks, he pours himself out and spreads, he goes mad with pride and satisfied virility; and he recalls the god of the Amazon who passes over forests and rivers scattering seeds of life: "My duty is to create!" "I sing the body electric," Whitman says in Children of Adam; and you should first read in Hebrew the patriarchal genealogies of Genesis; you should follow the naked, carnivorous bands of the first men through the trackless jungles, in order to find an appropriate resemblance to the enumeration, full of Satanic might, where like a famished hero licking bloodstained lips he describes the pertinencies of the female body. You say this man is brutal? Listen to this poem which, like many of his, has only two lines: "Beautiful Women." Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young, The young are beautiful- but the old are more beautiful than the young. And then there is "Mother and Babe": I see the sleeping babe nestling the breast of its mother, The sleeping mother and babe - hush'd, I study them long and long. He foresees that just as virility and gentleness combine to a high degree in men of superior temperament, these two qualities must join in the delightful peace on which life itself rests, with solemnity and joy worthy of the universe; these are the two energies that are needed to continue the task of creation. If he walks into the grass, he says that the grass caresses him, that "he already feels its joints move," and the most uneasy novice would not find such fiery words to describe the joy of his body, which he looks upon as part of his soul, when it [102]

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feels itself embraced by the sea. All living things love him: earth, night, and the sea love him: "Penetrate me, oh sea, with your loving moisture." He savors the air. He gives himself to the atmosphere like a tremulous bridegroom. He wants doors with no locks and bodies in their natural beauty; he believes he sanctifies all he touches or that touches him, and he finds virtue in all corporeality; he is Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding. No more nor less than anyone else. He depicts truth as a frantic lover who invades his body and, eager to possess him, frees him from his clothes. But in the clarity of midnight the soul, free of occupations and books, emerges integral, silent, and meditative from a nobly spent day, and reflects on the themes that please it most: on night, dreams, and death; on the song of the universal for the benefit of the common man; on how it is very sweet "to die advancing on" and to fall at the foot of a primitive tree, holding the ax in one's hands, stung by the last serpent in the woods. Imagine, then, what a new, strange effect this language, charged with splendid animality, must produce when it extols the passion which will unite men. In one poem of Calamus the poet brings together the delights he owes Nature and country; but he finds that only the ocean waves are worthy to chorus by moonlight his joy at seeing by his side, asleep, the friend whom he loves. He loves the humble, the fallen, the wounded, even the evildoer. He does not scorn the great, for to him only the useful are great. He puts his arm around the shoulders of teamsters, sailors, plowmen. He hunts and fishes with them, and at harvest time climbs with them atop of the loaded wagon. More beautiful to him than a triumphant emperor is a brawny Negro who standing on the string-piece behind his Percherons drives his dray calmly along busy Broadway. He understands all virtues, wins all prizes, works at all trades, suffers all pains, feels a heroic pleasure when he stops on the threshold of a smithy and sees that the young men, stripped to the waist, swing their hammers over-hand and each one hits in turn. He is the slave, the prisoner, he who fights, who falls, the beggar. When a slave comes to his door harried and covered with sweat, he fills a tub for him, has him sit at his table; in the corner he has his firelock loaded to defend him; if anyone comes to attack the slave he will kill the pursuer and come back to sit at his table, as though he had killed a snake! Walt Whitman, then, is satisfied; what pride can sting him when he knows he is standing on a blade of grass or a flower? What pride does a carnation have, or a leaf of salvia, or a honeysuckle vine? Why should he not look on human grief with equanimity when he knows that over all is an endless Being for whom there waits a happy immersion in Nature? What haste shall spur him when he believes all is where it belongs, and the volition of one man cannot change the path of the world? He suffers, it is true; but he considers minor and passing the part of him that suffers, and above toil and misery he feels there is another part that cannot

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suffer, for it knows universal greatness. It is enough for him to be as he is; and he watches, complacent and amused, the flow of his life, whether in silence or in acclamation. With a single blow he knocks aside romantic lamentation, a useless excrescence. "Not asking the sky to come down to my good will!" And what majesty there is in the phrase where he says that he loves animals "because they do not complain." The truth is that there are already too many who would make cowards of us. There is a pressing need to see what the world is like, in order not to make ants into mountains. Give men strength instead of taking from them with lamentations the little that pain has left them. Do the ulcerated go through the streets showing their sores? Neither doubt nor science disturbs him. "To you the first honours," he says to the scientists, "but science is only a room in my dwelling, it is not my whole dwelli~g; how poor are subtle reasonings compared to a heroic fact! Long live science, and long live the soul, which is superior to all science." But where his philosophy has completely mastered hate, as the wise men command, is in the phrase-not untinged with the melancholy of defeat-with which he plucks all envy by its roots: "Why should I envy," he says, "any brother of mine who does what I cannot do?" "He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own." "Let the sun penetrate the Earth, until it is all clear, sweet light, like my blood. Let joy be universal. I sing the eternity of existence, the joy of our life, and the implacable beauty of the universe. I wear calfskin shoes, a side collar, and a cane cut from a branch!" All this he utters in apocalyptic phrases. Rhymes, stresses? Oh, no! His rhythm lies in the stanzas which, in the midst of an apparent chaos of overlying and convulsed sentences, are nevertheless linked by a wise method ofcomposition that distributes the ideas in large musical groups, as the natural poetic form of a people who do not build stone by stone but by huge masses of stones. Walt Whitman's language, entirely different from that which poets have used till now, corresponds in its extravagance and drive to his cyclic poetry and to the new humanity congregated on a fertile continent under auspices of such magnitude as not to be contained in ditties or coy lyrics. This is not a matter of clandestine amours or of courtly ladies trading old gallants for new, or of sterile complaints by those who lack the energy to master life, or of discretion suitable to cowards. This is not a matter ofjingles and boudoir sighings, but of the birth of an era, the dawn of a definitive religion and of the renewal of mankind. It is a matter of a faith to replace the dead one, and it is revealed in the radiance of a redeemed man's proud peace; it is a matter ofwriting the holy books for a people who, as the world declines, gather from the udders and Cyclopean pomp of wild Nature all the virgin power of liberty. It is a matter of reflecting in words the noise of settling multitudes, of toiling cities, of tamed oceans and enslaved rivers. Should Walt Whitman then match rhymes and put into mild couplets these mountains of merchandise, forests of thorns, towns full of ships, battles where millions of men lay down their lives to insure the laws, and a sun that holds sway over all and pours its limpid fire into the vast landscape? [104]

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Oh, no! Walt Whitman speaks in Biblical verses; without apparent music, although after hearing them for a short time one realizes that these sounds ring like the earth's mighty shell when it is trodden by triumphant armies, barefoot and glorious. At times Whitman's language is like the front of a butcher shop hung with beef carcasses; at others it resembles the song of patriarchs seated in a circle, with the sadness of the world at the time of day when smoke loses itself among the clouds. Sometimes it sounds like an abrupt kiss, like a ravishment, like the cracking of leather as it dries in the sun. But never does his utterance lose its rhythmical, wavy motion. He himself tells how he speaks in "prophetical screams." "These," he says, "are a few words indicating the future." That is what his poetry is, an index finger; a sense of the universal pervades the book and gives it, within the surface confusion, a grandiose regularity; but his sentences - disjointed, flagellant, incomplete, unconnected-emit rather than express. "I fling out my fancies toward the white-topt mountains"; "Say, Earth, old top-knot, what do you want?" "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." He does not set in motion, not he, a beggarly thought, to stumble and creep along under the outward opulence of its regal dress. He is not one to puff up humming birds to resemble eagles; he showers down eagles every time he opens his hand, as a sower broadcasts seeds. One line may have five syllables, the following forty, and the one after that ten. He does not strain comparisons; as a matter of fact, he does not compare at all but says what he sees or remembers with a graphic, incisive complement and, being a confident master of the total impression he is ready to create, he uses his art, which is one of entire concealment, to reproduce the elements of his picture with the same disarray in which he observed them in Nature. Although he may wander off, he does not make discords, for this is the wayan unordered or unenslaved mind strays from a subject to its analogues; but then, as though he had only loosened the reins without dropping them altogether, he draws them suddenly tight and with a masterful hand keeps close control over his restive team, while his lines gallop along, swallowing up distances with each movement. Sometimes they whinny eagerly like stud stallions; at other, white and lathered, they set their hoofs on the clouds; and at still others, dark and daring, they plunge inside the earth, and the noise is long to be heard. Whitman sketches, but you would say that he uses a fire-tipped point. In five lines he groups, like a sheaf of freshly gnawed bones, all the horrors of war. An adverb is enough to expand or contract a phrase, and an adjective to sublimate it. His method has to be large, since its effect is; but it might be thought that he proceeds without any method whatsoever, especially in his use of words, which mixes elements with unheard-of audacity, putting the august and almost divine side by side with those which are considered the least appropriate and polite. There are some pictures that he does not paint with epithets-which with him are always lively and profound-but with sounds, which he assembles and disperses with consummate skill, thus, with a succession of procedures, maintaining interest, which the monotony of an exclusive mode would have jeopardized. Through repetitions he draws out melancholia like the savages. His caesura, unexpected and run-on, he

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changes ceaselessly and without conforming to any rule, although an intelligent arrangement can be detected in its developments, pauses, and grace notes. He finds that accumulation is the best way to describe, and his reasoning never assumes the pedestrian form of argumentation or the high-sounding form of oratory, but instead uses the mystery of suggestion, the fervor of uncertainty, and the flaming word of prophesy. At every step of the way we find words from our Spanish: viva, camarada [sic], libertad, americanos. But what could better depict his character than the French words with which, in visible ecstasy and as though to expand their meaning, he incrusts his poems: ami, exalte, accoucheur, nonchalant, ensemble? Ensemble, especially, charms him, for he sees in it the highest sphere of a people's life or a world's. From the Italian he has taken one word: bravura! Thus, honoring muscle and boldness; inviting passersby to put their hands on him without fear; hearing the song of things, with his palms upturned to the air; surprisedly and delightedly proclaiming gigantic fecundities; gathering up, in epic verse, seeds, battles, and orbs; showing astounded generations the radiant lives of men who on American valleys and mountains reach out to brush the hem of vigi1ant Liberty's skirt with bee wings; shepherding centuries toward the sheltering bay of eternal calm; thus while at outdoor tables his friends serve him the first catch of Spring fish washed down with champagne, Walt Whitman awaits the happy hour when the material part of him will withdraw, after having revealed to the world a truthful, sonorous and loving man, and when, given over to the purifying air, he will sprout and perfume it, "carefree, triumphant, dead!" La Naci6n (Buenos Aires) (April 19, 1887). Translated by Arnold Chapman. Reprinted in Jose Marti, Obras completas (La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1964) and widely reprinted in South America. Marti heard Whitman give his Lincoln lecture in New York on April 19, 1887.

2. RUBEN DARIO

«Walt Whitman" En su pais de hierro vive el gran viejo, Bello como un patriarca, sereno y santo. Tiene en la arruga olimpica de su entrecejo Algo que impera y vence con noble encanto. Su alma del infinito parece espejo; Son sus cansados hombros dignos del manto;

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Y con arpa labrada de un roble anejo, Como un profeta nuevo canta su canto.

Sacerdote que alienta soplo divino, Anuncia, en el futuro, tiempo mejor. Dice al aguila: «iVuela!"; «iBoga!", al marino, Y «iTrabaja!", al robusto trabajador. i As! va ese poeta por su camino, Con su soberbio rostro de emperador! In his land of iron lives the great elder Beautiful patriarch, serene and holy; His furrowed brow, of Olympic splendor, Commands and conquers with noble glory. His soul, like a mirror, the cosmos evokes, And his tired shoulders merit the mantle; With a lyre chiseled from an ancient oak, As a new prophet he sings his canticles. A high priest inspired with divine avail Heralds, in the future, a better spring, He tells the eagle: «Fly!"; the sailor: «Sail!"; And the robust worker to keep on working. Thus, the poet passes along his trail, With the splendid countenance of a king. Azul) 2d ed. (Guatemala: Imprenta de "La Union») 1890). Translation from Didier Tisdel

]aen) ed.) Homage to Walt Whitman (University: University of Alabama Press) 1969). Translated by Didier Tisdel Jaen.

3.

CEBRIA MONTOLIU

"Walt Whitman's Philosophy" We consider Whitman)s philosophy only a vision or subjective impression, a pure experience of the soul. Indeed, he is pragmatic par excellence, for in his conceptions one finds not only the origin but also the spirit itself of that philosophy of efficiency which would not be methodically formulated in his country until years later. This fact is an excellent proof of the autochthonous nature attributed to that doctrine. Whitman's pragmatism, at heart, is nothing but a pure and

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spontaneous manifestation of his passionate Americanism, a simple expression of his innate and vehement national temperament. As a good practical thinker Whitman systematically avoids formulas. Furthermore, not only does he abhor all formulas and systems but, also, in a most clear and emphatic way, he anticipates those who would deduce a doctrine from his writings and challenges their useless insistence in strong terms. While Whitman does not formulate, perhaps precisely because he does not formulate, he experiments and believes. His faith is built, as we shall see, on pure experience. There is a certain incompatibility between faith and symbol, just as between experience and doctrine, and this condition makes one of the two disappear when it becomes fused or crystalized in the other. The tragic problem of all life and movement is that they cannot be conceived without being, at the same time, destroyed. Just as we saw Whitman absorb with measureless desire all that was within reach of his hungry senses so we shall see him now absorb, with an equally insatiable instinct, the ideas that were floating in the intellectual atmosphere of his time, and swallow everything, without making distinctions, transforming all into his own substance, even the most contradictory opinions and theories. We have seen already a sample of this process when we considered the spiritual heritage that our poet received from Emerson. This heritage was so absolutely assimilated that, in his old age, once its narrow limits had been surpassed, Whitman did not even remember having ever used it and digested it at the time of his own personal development. And now we see how by the same means and similar vehicles, Whitman comes into contact with the immense wave of German idealistic subjectivism, then at the climax of its progress. Through the august figure of Carlyle, and by insensible derivations, he reaches this philosophy and permits Fichte and Hegel, especially, to take possession of his spirit to a point where he seems surrounded by their metaphysical eschatologies and rushing towards that hazy goal of a mystic speculation which related the full manifestation of the individual to the apocalyptic predestination ofthe Germanic country. No wonder then, that driven by the same idealistic whirlwind he gives himself over to the most static levities in Eastern mysticism with which - particularly in its broadest and deepest expression, Hindu theosophy- Whitman seemed to be intimately familiar. With such antecedents Walt might have become a sort of gymnosophist sleepwalker or a starved and frenzied poet, such as those turned out abundantly by the then fashionable romantic movement. But Walt did not let himselfbe imprisoned by the subtle threads of this metaphysical net. His spirit, always alert and open to the four corners ofthe world, absorbs with equal easiness the most ethereal inspirations of the soul and the grossest forms of the material world. Being an unrepentant sinner, according to his own confession, he declares himself the poet of the body with just as much enthusiasm as he declares himself the poet of the spirit and thinks none of the elements of the surrounding world lacks in divine qualities. It is not strange then to find in his writings - as deeply as the influence of German idealism - the trace left by the opposite and to a certain de[108]

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gree complementary ideologies initiated by Lamarque and Darwin in the field of physical sciences and transplanted by Comte and Spencer to the realm of ethics. Whitman, consistent with his principles, wished to apply to the sacred garden of poetry the method ofdirect observation, verbal information and objective description which that school had accepted as the only tools worthy of a scientific operation. He was not intimidated by the possibility ofbeing considered prosaic, a charge to which he left himself open because of his didactic tone and particularly because of the long enumerations of objects in some passages of his work. His primordial objective was to live in intimate contact with his country and his epoch and in order to accomplish this he did not spare himself efforts or sacrifices of any kind. Following the recommendations of positive science he availed himself of journalistic information and used it as a source for his poetical work, a fact that is revealed by the piles of clippings which he carefully saved and which were found after his death. The use of New York slang as his main instrument of literary expression, a practice that seemed to revolt some over-scholarly Yankees, should suffice to show how rigidly and completely Whitman attempted to embody the whole configuration of modern thought while pursuing an anti-aesthetic course. Likewise, Whitman, like Christ, wanted to de~cend to the infernal depths of the brilliant world that supported him, even if it was only to rise with greater strength to the lofty empire of his glorious resurrection. This titanic enterprise left on his work unequivocal signs of his desperate struggle to reconcile the eternal oppositions and to encompass the opposite poles of universal equilibrium. This we must consider a heroic decree of fate. The faults inherent in such an attitude should be viewed with indulgence or, at most, with the charming irony displayed by Emerson when, already an old man, he cast an Olympian glance over the finished work of the poet and said that it seemed to him a strange mixture of the Bhagavat-Gita and the New York Herald. Let us not draw erroneous conclusions from our analysis. No matter how deeply the materialistic forces acted on his spirit, and no matter how idolizing and passionate his sensual inclinations might have been, Whitman was still, at the bottom of his heart, the same Quaker poet already described in our account of his life [omitted in this extract]. Although some simple and devout soul may be scandalized by this assertion, the truth is that Whitman, a great Epicurean, appeared to be transfigured by an insatiable thirst for immortality. "He is a God-intoxicated faun," we feel tempted to exclaim when, without prejudice, we contemplate the entirety of his poetic work in a single glance. For the more we penetrate his spirit, the firmer our conviction grows that Whitman is "the poet of the body" in a most absolute way, not only for what the body is in itself, but also for its divine content. The body reveals this in its highest form and Whitman worships it with idolatry. Because this is so we may say, in a profound sense, that we can hardly conceive of him as a whole unless it is as a great mystic poet, certainly one of the greatest in the history of mankind. So patent is his direct human vocation, as one of his latest commentators has said (Carleton Noyes in An Approach to Walt Whitman) that Whitman, the good Cebria Montoliu

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comrade, seldom appears immediately as a spiritual guide. Those who knew him in life felt irresistibly attracted to him without perhaps discovering the true source of his extraordinary strength and balance. There was more than merely a commanding personal magnetism to distinguish him from the masses. There were unsuspected depths of which his charm was only the overflow and expression. He was endowed with a heroic physique, of great perfection and beauty, and yet the specific essence ofhis temperament was spiritual. He himselfrecognized, in a manner allowable only to a few chosen ones, that the central reality of the human being is the soul. The passion and struggle to reach the sours heritage became the driving force of his life. Once he has cast himself happily into that great adventure, he dares everything, he risks and he suffers all. His happiness lies in the prosecution of this great enterprise. His reward is getting to know God. In accordance with this mystic vision of the world, Whitman finds the key to life's enigma in death and only in death. But death-and this should be well understood - has for him the mystic significance of a bridge which leads to a new phase of eternal life. Death is not cessation, but change of being; it is not the end but the beginning, and in this transition there is no dissolution of continuity; all life tends towards this development and expansion of itself. In regard to the illdefined question of "immortality," Whitman wastes no time trying to solve it; he considers it a vain problem and simply affirms his belief in it. The conviction of truth comes to him as an intuition, but in such a vital manner that there is no room for argument. Immortality is the premise of all his life experience and his supreme and unique interpretation of it. This concept determines his way of thinking. Whitman is, then, a real visionary and however correct Bucke may be in fixing the moment of his life when he had this vision, the truth is that this vision did occur and that it transfigured with the most resplendent celestial aura all the life and work of this heroic personality. Once this is accepted, it is hardly necessary to add what Carleton Noyes says: "Whitman's intimate experience cannot be expressed with words." Only the soul knows God and souls have no words. Whitman's religious experience is so intimate and personal that he can express it in his poems only through symbols extracted from common language by his exuberant imagination. One fact clearly stands out from all others in his life: the sum and essence of Whitman's life is Religion. In a sense both mystical and practical, his supreme desire was to attain union between soul and God. Religion, as he conceives it and lives it, is not merely one part of human experience - indeed, the loftiest - but the totality of existence, giving value to all forms of human activity and making possible that "the whole and its parts fit together." As is usually the case with Anglo-Saxons, Whitman's mysticism is neither egotistical nor static; it does not gravitate towards itself in the sterile fashion of contemplative lives which rejoice in the stagnant waters of a negative passivity following the spirit of some schools in our midst which have monopolized the realm of the soul. On the contrary, Walt transforms his own revelation into a "message,"

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declaring himself the "prophet of a greater Religion." It is difficult to define this religion in a few words, especially when he himself was not able to define it in his whole life. But we might say to the reader that although he may already consider Whitman a mystic pantheist, he must not let himself be deceived by this term, because Whitman's conception of God has nothing of that dry vagueness so commonly criticized in pantheism. Whitman believes in the divine quality of everything without implying that each thing is God; but rather affirms that God reveals himselfin all and each of them. For Whitman everything is divine, but if he must choose for his own worship he chooses the human figure as the most divine of all, the true temple of God, as Saint Paul said. What might this God be? This is the mystery. Let us call him, according to Saint Paul, "the unknown God"; let us believe firmly in his revealed work and this will suffice to put us in direct communication with him, although it may be impossible for us to see him. This is precisely what happened to Whitman, according to his own testimony, when he raised a corner of the veil that hides the mystery of his mystic revelation. Burning in this immense fire of love, in which, as we shall see further on, he is to forge all his ethic and social conception of the world, his religious program is a pure, ample derivation of that brotherly embrace in which he encompasses all beings. He calls it a greater Religion not because he wishes to oppose it to the various religions disputing among each other for the faith of a majority of men, but because he wishes to embrace them all in his powerful arms. Let us make clear, however, that no eclecticism finds its way into this religious attitude; rather it is the transcendental force itself of his faith which impels him to accept others as approximate instruments for expressing that which in his own faith is essentially inexplicable. The capital center of his mystic apostleship, that which inspired him to write "All is truth" and to search and defend a broader and higher form for his Religion, is found in the profound truth of all things, there, where all divergencies meet. Such is, in synthesis, Whitman's religious pragmatism. Firmly based on the fundamental findings of his own experience, he always refuses to define the concrete contours of his ideal kingdom so as to allow freedom for every one. However, he was once or twice guilty of attempting definitions. Such is the case of "Chanting the Square Deific," a poem in which Whitman ventures to outline a sort ofvast theogonic synthesis coinciding with some commonly accepted formulas and making use of symbols already established by tradition. In this poem, "Chanting ... ," without failing to recognize the ineffable nature of God, Whitman dares to express in human terms that which he humanly conceives as the ineffable and divine principle of the universe. He draws a symbol magically suggestive of all his gnostic experience. Four powers or forces compose the Square: law and judgement; love and forgiveness; rebellion and malice; and reconciliation and fusion of all in one. These four powers are personified by Jehovah, Christ, Satan and the Holy Spirit. Law is the fundamental principle of the universe. Nothing can escape the non-

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created, fatal norm of its own creation. The decree of compensation by which Law retributes all actions is imperturbable, inexorable and mathematically just. Jehovah is the God-Judge who passes sentence without appeal and executes without scruple. But this is only the basis of the Square. Interdicting Law and rising against its ruling, Love appears. Christ rises and beholds us, gentle comforter, stretching out his hand to bless us. God is Love and therefore Christ is the most powerful of all gods. Love departs from the Law, but perpetuates it, it does not destroy Law, it only redeems it from its tyranny; Love is the divine grace that bears fruit in the world which is Law's slave, by means of the celestial dew of hope. The individual dies, but Love survives. The Savior passes, but salvation is eternal. At the extreme opposite of Love, Rebellion rises. The individual affirms himself and his own divine will. This is the domain of Satan, the Anti-Christ, divine and "permanent," the same as any other and as real as any other. Where Law exists, so does transgression of the Law. There is no good without its corresponding evil. In the finite world of human experience the principle of evil is a necessity.and will exist as long as its limitations last. Closing the Square, parallel to Law, satisfying Love, dominating Evil, comes the Holy Spirit. This is the last reality and the only essence of all things, which includes not only the Savior and Satan, but also God himself conceived as a person. And with the consideration of this brief but superior sketch of theodicy we come to the end ofWhitman's bold though really unformulated philosophic conception. We recognize, of course, the grave doubts that the various and startling projections suggested in the course of our brief perusal may have raised in the reader's mind. But, whatever be the absolute value of this amalgamatio~ of the most contradictory ideas and tendencies, one thing is clear and that is that the real tie linking these antitheses is no other than the author's robust personality, a personality which is one of the most dynamic and compact syntheses to have embodied the volatile and multiform human logos. We must not lose sight of Whitman's inaccessible position on an intellectual level superior to the thousand controversies originated by the juxtaposition of those ideas. In spite of the doubts that we may feel, it is not useless to surmount these intellectual heights since it is in these heights where we shall find the true source of Whitman's specific opinions in the realm of immediate reality. And if from this postulate of "pure reason" we pass on to the examination of his "practical reason," we shall easily deduce the diverse consequences of the application of those superior principles to the uneasy field of ethical, political and aesthetic problems of contemporary life. Introduction to Montoliu's Catalan translation of Leaves ofGrass (Fulles D'Herba) (Barcelona: Libreria L'Avene, 1909). Translation from the Spanish version, Walt Whitman, el hombre y su obra (Buenos Aires: Editorial Poseid6n, 1943), by permission ofPoseid6n. Translated by Fernando Alegria.

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4.

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

"Adamic Song" It happened one Biblical afternoon, the towers of the city gloriously resting against the sky like giant ears of golden wheat emerging from the greenness that clothes the river. I took up Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, that American, enormous embryo of a secular poet, about whom Robert Louis Stevenson said that like a shaggy dog, just unchained, went scouring the beaches of the world baying at the moon. I took those leaves and translated some for my friend in the quiet splendor of the golden city. And my friend said to me: «What a strange impression one gets from those enumerations of peoples and lands, nations, things and plants! ... Is that poetry?" And I said to him: "When lyric poetry becomes spiritualized and reaches the sublime it ends in mere enumerations, in uttering dear names with a sigh. The first stanza in the eternal love-dialogue may be «I love you, I love you very much, I love you with all my soul," but the last one, the one that comes with surrender contains only these two words: Romeo! Juliet! Romeo! Juliet! There is no deeper love-sigh than the repetition of the beloved name, relishing it like honey in your mouth. And consider the child. I shall never forget an immortal scene that God put one morning before my eyes. I saw three children hand in hand, standing by a horse, singing nothing but these words in mad delight: A horse! a horse! a horse! They were creating the word as they repeated it. Theirs was a Genesis song. «How did lyric poety begin?" asked my friend, «which was the first song?" «Let us turn to legend," I said, «and listen to what the Genesis says in its second chapter: 'So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him.' This was the first song, the song naming the animals; Adam in ecstasy before them, in the dawn of mankind." To give a name! To give a name to something is, in a way, to take possession of it spiritually. This same Walt Whitman, whose Leaves ofGrass we have here, in his «Song At Sunset" said these words: «To breathe the air, how delicious! To speakto walk - to seize something by the hand!" He could have added: To name things, what a startling miracle! Upon naming the animals and birds, Adam took possession of them. And note the eighth Psalm: after singing of God's command to man that he be the master of the works created by the divine hands, God having laid everything at his feetsheep and oxen, beasts of the field, birds of the air, and fishes of the sea, and whatever passes along the path of the sea, the psalm ends: «0 Lord, our Lord, how ma-

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jestic is thy name in all the earth!" Ifwe knew an appropriate name, a poetic name, a creative name for God, all lyric poetry would be summed up in it as in an eternal flower. Also in Genesis, verses twenty-four to thirty, chapter thirty-two, we are told how Jacob crossed the ford of Jabbok and, searching for his brother Esau, decided to spend the night outdoors; he was attacked by a stranger, an angel sent by God or perhaps God himself, and during the struggle Jacob, full of anguish, kept inquiring the other's name. In those ancient times a traveler who uttered his name gave away his essential being. Homeric heroes immediately tell us their names. And these names were not said; they were sung in a surge of enthusiasm and adoration. And I am most certain, reader, that the hymn which most deeply penetrated your heart was that which carried your name, your baptismal name, pure and bare, expressed with a sigh in semi-darkness. That is the crown of lyrical poetry. The litany is perhaps the most exquisite poetic form that a lyrical explosion can offer: a name repeated as in a rosary and each time joined to lively epithets which'enhance it. And among these we find the sacred epithet. In Homeric poems the sacred epithets shine forth: each hero has his own. Achilles is he of the fast feet; Hector, the plume shaker. And in all times and places when someone finds the sacred epithet which poetically fits a man, everyone adopts it and repeats it. And what is true of men is also true of animals, things and ideas. The sly fox, the faithful dog, the noble horse, the patient donkey, the slow ox, the churlish goat, the mild sheep, the timid hare ... and ,Providence's intentions, can they be anything but inscrutable? Singing, then, a name, enhancing it with a sacred epithet is the reflective exaltation of lyric poetry; and the irreflective exaltation, the supreme, is singing the name by itself, bare, without epithet; it is repeating it again and again, as if submerging one's soul in its ideal content. "I am not surprised," I told my friend, "to see that those enumerations affect you in a strange manner, and I confess to you that they may not possess anything poetical at all. Yet, they seem stranger to those of us who, by means of dead words, have reduced lyric poetry to something oratorical, a sort of rhymed eloquence. Remember besides," I added, "that a word has not attained its splendor and purity until it has acquired rhythm and until it has become joined to others through its own cadence: it is like wheat which is not clean and ready for the mill until it has been purified by winnowing on the threshing floor." "Now I remember," said my friend inserting a whimsical note, "I remember a Yankee joke which goes like this: when Adam was naming the animals and he approached the horse, Eve told her husband, 'This thing that is coming here looks like a horse; so let's call him horse.'" "The joke is not bad," I said, "but it happens that when Adam named the country-animals and the birds, woman had not yet been created, according to Genesis. Therefore one must conclude that man felt the need of talking even when he was alone, that is to say, talking to himself, which is the same as singing, so that his act of naming the creatures was an act of lyrical purity, perfectly unselfish. He [114]

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invented the names to enjoy them in ecstasy. But once he created the names and sang them he needed a fellow creature to whom he could communicate these names; after the naming-hymn had resulted from the exuberance of his enthusiasm, he felt the need of an audience, but, according to the text, Adam did not find help around him. And immediately after this, the Biblical narration tells us of the creation of woman, growing her out of a rib of the first man, as though man had felt the need for a companion as a result of having mastered the animals by giving them a name. Man was in need of someone to talk to, and so God made a woman for him. And as soon as the woman appears before him, after he said, 'This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,' the first thing that he does is to give her a name, saying: 'this will be called a woman, because out of man she was created.' But the Spanish varona did not prevail. The majority of cultured peoples have a name for woman which comes from a different root and which seems to make out of man and woman two different species." "Except English," said my friend. "And some other languages," I added. And gathering up Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass we left behind the splendor of the city melting into the twilight. "£1 canto adanico," in EI espejo de la muerte (Madrid: Compania Iberoamericana de Publicaciones, 1930). Translated by Fernando Alegria.

5.

LE6N FELIPE

((Habla el·Prologo" lEs inoportuno, amigos y poetas americanos y espanoles, que yo os congregue aqui ahora y os traiga conmigo al viejo comarada de Long Island? No. Esta es la hora mejor. Ahora ... cuando avanza el trueno para borrar con trilita la palabra libertad, de todos los rincones de la tierra, cuando el hombre ha perdido su air6n y su bandera y todos somos reses marcadas entre vallados y alambradas, quiero yo presentaros a este poeta de cabana sin puerta frente al camino abierto, a este poeta de halo, de cayada y de mochila; ahora ... cuando reculan frente al odio el amor y la fe quiero yo presentaros con verbo castellano, yen mi vieja manera de decir, a este poeta del amor, de la fe y de la rebeldia. Aqui esta. iMiradlo! Leon Felipe

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Se llama Walt. Asi 10 nombran el viento, los pajaros y las corrientes de los grandes rios de su pueblo. Walt es el diminutivo de Walter (Gualterio en castellano). Mas bien es la poda del patronimico hasta el monosilabo simple, onomatopeyico y gutural: Walt. 4 CANTARA SU CANCI6N Y SE IRA

No tiene otro titulo ni r6tulo a la puerta. No es doctor, ni reverendo ni maese ... No es misionero tampoco. No viene a repartir catecismos ni reglamentos, ni a colgarle a nadie una cruz en la solapa. Ni a juzgar: ni a premiar ni a castigar. Viene sencillamente a cantar una canci6n. Cantara su canci6n y se ira. Manana, de madrugada, se ira. Cuando os despereteis vosotros, ya con el sol en el cielo, no encontrareis mas que el recuerdo encendido de su voz. Pero esta noche sera vuestro huesped. Abridle la puerta, los brazos, los oidos y el coraz6n de par en par. Porque es vuestra canci6n la que vais a escuchar.

(CThe Prologue Speaks" Is it inopportune, friends and poets, American or Spanish, that I gather you here today and bring to you with me the old comrade from Long Island? No. This is the best hour. Now ... when the thunder advances to erase with tritium the word freedom from all the corners of the earth, when man has lost his plume and his banner, [116]

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and all of us are branded cattle within palings and wire fences, I want to present to you this poet with a cabin without door facing the open road, this poet with a halo, with a cane, and a knapsack; now ... when love and faith are yielding to hatred I want to present to you in my Castilian words, in myoid manner of speaking, this poet of love, of faith, and rebellion. Here he is. Behold him! His name is Walt. Thus he is called by the wind, the birds, and the currents of the great rivers of his people. Walt is the diminutive of Walter (Gualterio in Spanish). It is rather the pruning of the patronymic to the monosyllable, simple, onomatopoeic and guttural: Walt. 4 HE SHALL SING HIS SONG AND THEN LEAVE

He has no other title or inscription at his door. He is not a Doctor, nor a Reverend, nor a Master ... Neither is he a Missionary. He does not come to deliver catechisms o.r laws, nor to hang a cross on anybody's breast. Nor to judge to· reward, or to punish. He simply comes to sing a song. He shall sing his song and then leave. Tomorrow, at dawn, he shall leave. When you shall awaken, with the sun already up in the sky, you shall find nothing but the burning me1J.1ory of his voice. But tonight he shall be your guest. Open your door, your arms, your ears, and your heart fully wide. For the song you shall hear is your song. From the verse prologue in Walt Whitman: Canto a mi mismo (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1941). Translated by Didier Tisdel Jaen. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

Leon Felipe

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6. PABLO NERUDA

"Oda a Walt Whitman" Yo no recuerdo a que edad, ni d6nde, si en el gran Sur mojado o en la costa temible, bajo el breve grito de las gaviotas, toque una mano y era la mano de Walt Whitman: pise la tierra con los pies desnudos, anduve sobre el pasto, sobre el firme rocio de Walt Whitman. Durante mijuventud toda me acompaft6 esa mano, ese rocio, su firmeza de pino patriarca, su extensi6n de pradera, y su misi6n de paz circulatoria. Sin desdeftar los dones de la tierra, la copiosa curva del capitel, ni la inicial purpurea de la sabiduria, tu me enseftaste a ser americano, levantaste mis ojos a los libros, hacia

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WHITMAN IN SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA

el tesoro de los cereales: ancho, en la claridad de las Hanuras, me hiciste ver el alto monte tutelar. Del eco subternineo, para mi recogiste todo, todo 10 que nacia cosechaste galopando en la alfalfa, cortando para mi las amapolas, visitando los rios, acudiendo en la tarde a las cocinas. Pero no s610 tierra sac6 ala luz tu pala: desenterraste al hombre, yel esclavo humiHado contigo, balanceando la negra dignidad de su estatura, camin6 conquistando la alegria. AI fogonero, abajo, en la caldera, mandaste un canastito de frutiHas, a todas las esquinas de tu pueblo un verso

Pablo Neruda

[119]

tuyo llego de visita y era como un trozo de cuerpo limpio el verso que llegaba, como tu propia barba pescadora o el solemne camino de tus piernas de acacia. Paso entre los soldados tu silueta de bardo, de enfermero, de cuidador nocturno que conoce el sonido de la respiracion en la agonfa y espera con la aurora el silencioso regreso de la vida. Buen panadero! Primo hermano mayor de mis raices, cupula de araucaria, hace ya cien afios que sobre el pasto tuyo y sus germinaciones, el viento pasa sin gastar tus ojos. Nuevos y crueles afios en tu patria: persecusiones, higrimas, prisiones, armas envenenadas y guerras iracundas, no han aplastado la hierba de tu libro, el manantial vital [120]

WHITMAN IN SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA

de su frescura. Y,ay! los que asesinaron a Lincoln ahora se acuestan en su cama, derribaron su sitial de olorosa madera y erigieron un trono por desventura y sangre salpicado. Pero canta en las estaciones suburbanas tu voz, en los desembarcaderos vespertinos chapotea como aqua oscura tu palabra, tu pueblo blanco y negro, pueblo de pobres, pueblo simple como todos los pueblos, no olvida tu campana: se congrega cantando bajo la magnitud de tu espaciosa vida: entre los pueblos con tu amor camina acariciando Pablo Neruda

[121]

el desarrollo puro de la fraternidad sobre la tierra.

"Ode to Walt Whitman" I do not remember

at what age nor where: in the great damp South or on the fearsome coast, beneath the brief cry of the seagulls, I touched a hand and it was the hand of Walt Whitman. I trod the ground with bare feet, I walked on the grass, on the firm dew of Walt Whitman. During my entire youth I had the company of that hand, that dew, its firmness of patriarchal pine, its prairie-like expanse, and its mission of circulatory peace. Not disdaining the gifts of the earth, nor the copious curving of the column's capital, nor the purple initial of wisdom, you taught me to be an American, you raised my eyes to books, towards

[122]

WHITMAN IN SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA

the treasure of the grains: broad, in the clarity of the plains, you made me see the high tutelary mountain. From subterranean echoes, you gathered forme everything; everything that came forth was harvested by you, galloping in the alfalfa, picking poppies for me, visiting the rivers, coming into the kitchens in the afternoon. But not only soil was brought to light by your spade: you unearthed man, and the slave who was humiliated with you, balancing the black dignity of his stature, walked on, conquering happiness. To the fireman below, in the stoke-hole, you sent a little basket of strawberries. To every corner of your town a verse

Pablo Neruda

[123]

of yours arrived for a visit, and it was like a piece of clean body, the verse that arrived, like your own fisherman beard or the solemn tread of your acacia legs. Your silhouette passed among the soldiers: the poet, the wound-dresser, the night attendant who knows the sound of breathing in mortal agony and awaits with the dawn the silent return of life. Good baker! Elder first cousin of my roots, ., araucarla s cupola, it is now a hundred years that over your grass and its germinations, the wind passes without wearing out your eyes. New and cruel years in your Fatherland: persecutions, tears, prisons, poisoned weapons and wrathful wars have not crushed the grass of your book; the vital fountainhead [124]

WHITMAN IN SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA

of its freshness. And, alas! those who murdered Lincoln now lie in his bed. They felled his seat of honor made of fragrant wood, and raised a throne spattered with misfortune and blood. But your voice sings in the suburban stations, in the vespertine wharfs, your word splashes like dark water. Your people, white and black, poor people, simple people like all people do not forget your bell: They congregate singing beneath the magnitude of your spacious life. They walk among the peoples with your love caressing Pablo N eruda

[125]

the pure development of brotherhood on earth. Odas elementales (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1954). Translated by Didier Tisdel Jaen. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

7. JORGE LUIS BORGES

((Camden, 1892" El olor del cafe y de los peri6dicos. El domingo y su tedio. La manana Y en la entrevista pagina esa vana Publicaci6n de versos aleg6ricos De una colega feliz. El hombre viejo Esta postrado y blanco en su decente Habitaci6n de pobre. Ociosamente Mira su cara en el cansado espejo. Piensa, ya sin asombro, que esa cara Es el. La distraida mano toca La turbia barba y la ~aqueada boca. No esta lejos el fin. Su voz declara: Casi no soy, pero mis versos ritman La vida y su esplendor. Yo fui Walt Whitman. The smell of coffee and the daily Times. The Sunday morning tedium, once again, And on the page, unclearly seen, that vain Publication of allegoric rhymes Bya happy colleague. On his death-bed, In his decent though humble bedroom, The man lies white and wasted. With boredom, He views the tired reflection of his head. He thinks, no longer amazed, that this face Is }Ie, and brings his distrait fingertips To touch his tarnished beard and ravaged lips. The end is near, and he states his case: I hardly am, but my verse is rhythmal To the splendid life. I was Walt Whitman. Obra poetica (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1966). Translated by Didier Tisdel Jaen. Reprinted by permission of the translator. [126]

WHITMAN IN SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA

8.

JORGE GUILLEN

My Relationship with Whitman My dear friend, you ask me to write, as a reader and an author, a few words about my relationship with Walt Whitman. Well, I first took notice of the great poet - I still consider him so - in the twenties, and I read him with interest a little later at Sevilla in the thirties in Leon Bazalgette's translation published by the Mercure de France (1922 is the date of my edition). My reading of it-which I pursued in English - was posterior to the impulse which made me write Cantico, without any bookish influence - God knows, as we say in Spanish - and as the mere expression of a temperament. Whitman dazzled me and confirmed my ins~inctive tendency to look for - or better, to feel for-an immediate contact with life without looking for it. It is strange that man's attachment to life should not be accompanied by a clearer consciousness: the consciousness of the ears which hear, of the eyes which see, of the lungs which breathe. Life and poetry are like a deep breathing. Nothing made me feel it so much-from a literary point of view-as Whitman's verse, whose form did not suit my purpose as a poet and whose historical birth took place far away in the United States at a time when it was beginning to grow. But I was attracted by the elan, by the lambent light of dawn, by physical health as a potent factor, and the loving embrace; by that manly encounter with a beyond which is this earthly herebelow. And all this without the interference of any theory. Optimism and pessimism are opinions - nothing more. And a poem does not record opinions, but something which is really experienced by the whole being. Whitman revelled in wonder-like the philosopher according to Socrates. This Spanish reader was-and is-in spite of so many vicissitudes-an admirer. Of what? Of the act of breathing. Like Whitman. For fifty years I have not said - in the foreground of my poems- anything else. Roger Asselineau and William White, eds., Walt Whitman in Europe Today (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972). Translated by Roger Asselineau, from a letter written to the translator by Guillen on April 11, 1971.

Jorge Guillen

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. MARIA CLARA BONETTI PARO

Whitman in Brazil In 1889, on the occasion of a republican government replacing a monarchy in Brazil, Walt Whitman sent "a Christmas Greeting" to the South American country, welcoming his "Brazilian brother" into democracy (LG, 548). But not until the twentieth century did the new and rebellious perfume of Leaves of Grass reach Brazil, carried by symbolism and the avant-garde movements, mainly futurism and unanimism, which were flourishing in Europe during the first quarter of the century. Literature in Brazil at the turn of the century was ruled by neo-Parnassians, neo-naturalists, and neo-symbolists, who emphasized rigid obedience to metric rules and Portuguese grammar. Beyond this there flourished an impersonal concept of art for art's sake that had grown artificial and outdated amidst a nationalistic climate that strengthened civic pride and the desire to find a personal voice for Brazilian literature. Even though good poetry had been written, Parnassianism, the dominant school, was incapable of coping with the increasing social, political, and cultural changes of the first decades of the new century that required new forms of expression. "To make rhymes in Brazil is still the best way not to be a poet," wrote poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1989) in 1923 (de Andrade, 32). Striving to change the situation, a new generation of writers had to wage long, hard battles that led, eventually, to poetic renovation and to the literary movement known as modernism (1922-1945). [ 128 ]

The principal arena in this artistic struggle was the Municipal Theater in Sao Paulo, where the Modern Art Week Exhibition (the Brazilian equivalent to the American Armory Show) was staged in February 1922. The date had been deliberately chosen to make the overthrow of the archaic aesthetics coincide with the centennial celebration of Brazil's political independence. The period from 1922 to 1930 is correctly called "heroic" because both sides, the "traditionalists" (passadistas) and the "futurists" (as the modernists were known at that time), assumed militant and often extreme positions. Consider the following lines by writer and critic Sergio Milliet (1898-1966) regarding the position ofthose who wanted renovation: "We had to break everything, destroy, kill, bury, cremate. That is what we did from about 1921 to 1932" (Milliet, 240-241). Although Leaves ofGrass was not well known at that time, Whitman's reputation was strong enough for him to be enlisted in the ranks o~ Brazilian modernism. Amazingly enough, in the first phase of Brazilian modernism, Whitman came to be respected by both of the opposing groups. In the early 19205 Whitmanism had reached its greatest peak in France and remained influential throughout the decade (Allen, 287). It is no surprise that there was also a Brazilian "whitmanismo," for in the first decades of the century Brazil was culturally linked to France. Whitman's presence in French literature was then so strong that he was even included in a collection of contemporary French poetry entitled L'Anthologie de L'Effort, published in 1912 by Jean-Richard Bloch (Erkkila, 171). Before the 1920S, Whitman was scarcely mentioned in Brazilian periodicals, and when he was, his name was frequently paired with French and Belgian symbolists. Leaves ofGrass crossed the Brazilian border with a symbolist literary passport. Pointing out the importance of Belgian symbolism for the study of that movement in Brazil, critic Andrade Murici said that "the powerful Verhaeren prepared the road for a late but numerous Whitmanian seaquake" (Murici, 1: 44). In the 1920S in Brazil, Whitman's spirit, or his gospel, was easily found. He was the welcome spokesman of the modern world, the apostle of renovation in form and content, and one of the poets who could nourish what John Barth called a "literature of replenishment" after the exhaustion of the old aesthetic rules and principles. References to the singer of the New World became increasingly more frequent in the debates that followed the Week of Modern Art. In an article written in 1934, the essayist Sebastiao Sampaio expressed regret about the delay of reciprocal cultural exchange between Brazil and the United States and added that "Whitman came so late that it was in fact Modernism that made his homage to Brooklyn Bridge [ponte de Brooklyn] known to the public" (Sampaio, 22). Due to Whitman's literary reputation and "contemporaneity," he was used by the passadistas as a shield against the attacks of those who accused them of being behind the times and by the futurists, for whom he was a spear, to encourage Brazilian literature to venture "in paths untrodden" (LG, 112). Speaking for the passadista group, Angelo Guido, in a 1923 article entitled "FuMaria Clara Bonetti Paro

[129]

turism," gave his own definition of this avant-garde movement and added that several passadistas had done exactly the same (Guido, 376-379). Whitman is included among the passadistas. On behalf of the futurists, Murilo Araujo, in the article "Futurismo e Estetica Intencional," declared that he took pride in being called a futurist because "Verhaeren, the great, and Walt Whitman, the two best poets in the world, are called futurists by critics nowadays" (Araujo, 314-316). In those days in Brazil, futurism was very often used in a broad sense. It was an antonym of traditional (passadista) and had almost nothing to do with the Italian movement founded in 1909 by Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944). Nevertheless, futurism helped spread Whitman's work when Marinetti mentioned him among six other writers as a forerunner of his aesthetics. Despite the differences between Whitman and Marinetti, in some critical appreciations they were nevertheless paired as literary innovators. For the embattled modernists who were trying to break down the rigid adherence to metric rules, Whitman offered a model of free verse. At a time when the modernists were trying to turn away from the poetic emphasis on the past, with its cultural allusions to Greek gods and mythology, Whitman was looked upon as the poet of the present and the singer of the common people and the modern world. And when, with nationalistic pride and suffering from an "anxiety of influence," they were trying to do without European models, Whitman was looked upon as a brother and as an escape from European influence. He was someone who, like Poe, had inverted the direction of influence between the Old and the New World, named "notre poete" by Valery Larbaud (Erkkila, 179). It is not difficult to find extremely appreciative references to Whitman's work in publications of the 1920S. In the article "A literatura em 1920" ("Literature in 1920"), Alceu Amoroso Lima expressed a desire for a Brazilian Whitman: "The world of action can produce a Whitman. We have not had him yet, and our poetry continues to be a place secluded from everyday reality" (Lima, 12). In 1923 critic Tasso da Silveira (1895-1968) expressed the same wish: "I say 'our Whitman' and not just 'our great poet,' because it is a Whitman we long for; it is for a passionate singer who, in gigantic symphonies, would celebrate the new world that we are, the dawning of a new race we represent, the vastness of the place we have been given on the planet, and the multiform uproar of desire and dream which comes from our complex ethnic identity" (Silveira 1923, 151). Unlike in France, where literary citizenship was conferred on the American poet, in Brazil Whitman was often regarded either as the singer of the New World (encompassing, therefo~e, the three Americas) or as a North American who could fertilize Brazilian or tropical leaves of grass. Whitman's idealistic vision of America as a huge Bakhtinean marketplace where a poet-prophet, with cosmic consciousness, could transform everybody into comrades and equals in a "new city of Friends" was especially attractive to the Carioca spiritualist group ofthe symbolist magazine Festa, which published twelve issues in 1927 and 1928. The influence of Jules Romain's unanimism (1905-1914)

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WHITMAN IN BRAZIL

and more specifically of Emile Verhaeren's poetry is also evident in this utopian vision, and many times Whitman and Verhaeren are mentioned together. Among the members of Festa, Tasso da Silveira is the poet who most clearly embraces Whitman's prophetic gospel. He translated into Portuguese the first poem from Leaves of Grass to appear in Brazil: in the fourth issue of Terra do Sol (Land of the Sun) a Portuguese translation of "Poets to Come" ("Poetas que virao") was published anonymously (Silveira 1924,35), and later Silveira acknowledged the translation as his. In the same issue, in "Notas e Comentatios," the same poem was presented in three other languages: in French, translated by Leon Bazalgette; in Italian, by Luigi Gamberale; and, in Spanish, by Armando Vasseur. The fact that the original English version was not given is an indication that many Brazilian writers read Whitman's poems in translation before reading them in the original version. Whitman's impact on Festa is unquestionable. He was the only foreign poet represented in the first issue - a translation of Section 3 of "Salut au Mondel" (Silveira 1927, 12). In the fifth issue (February 1928), Sections 18, 21, and 24 of "Song of Myself' were published in anonymous translations again (no doubt also by Silveira) (Silveira 1928). It is not difficult to see which topic of Whitman's "ensemble" was most cherished by the spiritualist members of Festa and by Silveira: the idyllic and optimistic vision of the natural, human, and social world. As for form, Silveira's free verse, which he began writing in 1926, corresponds more closely to the model given by Verhaeren, whose importance in his work and life he acknowledged several times. Although dressed up in Christian array, Whitman's diction is clearly perceived in most of Silveira's poems, from Alegorias do Homon Novo (Allegories of the New Man) (1926) to Cantos do Campo de Batalha (Battlefield Songs) (1945), and the latter book contains an overt allusion to Whitman in the poem entitled "Palavras a Whitman" ("Words to Whitman") (Silveira 1962, 204-206). In direct opposition to the misreading of Whitman as singer of all the Americas, Silveiraas an ephebe who tries to "complete" his "truncated precursor"-abounds in "tesserae" (to use Harold Bloom's terminology [Bloom, 49-73]). In his poetic tribute, Silveira calls Whitman the "wonderful incomplete" because, although he exalted the whole world, when he sang America he referred to only one half of the continent: A outra metade que nao advinhaste, nao previste, no fundidouro dos destinos misteriosos se condensava e vai surgindo agora como algum virgem orbe que faltasse ao equilibrio das constelc;oes ... E assim, Poeta-Profeta, ao lado de teu canto, Maria Clara Bonetti Para

[131]

erque-se, por integrar-te, urn canto novo: 0 canto da alma inquieta do meu povo! (Silveira 1962, 204)

-

The other half that you didn't foretell or foresee was condensing itself in the melting pot of an unknown destiny and is becoming visible as a virgin orb that was missing in the balance of the constellations ... And so, Poet-Prophet Beside your song, Rising to join it, a new chant: - the chant of the anxious soul of my people. In spite of various readings or misreadings of Leaves ofGrass, what is certain is that Whitman was part ofthe general literary consciousness in those days in Brazil. Even when references were made to the fact that Whitman was not well known, the tone was always one of regret. The same high standards by which Whitman was judged in Festa are used by the so-called dynamic traditionalists, who gathered around writer and diplomat Grac;a Aranha (1868-1931). Among the members of that group, Ronald de Carvalho, one of Aranha's favorite disciples, unquestionably became the most Whitmanian writer with Toda a America (All the Americas), published in 1926. There is no doubt that Carvalho had Whitman in mind when he wrote Toda a America. In the general conception of the book, as well as in many of the poems, he echoed the American poet, or "completed" him, in a manner similar to what had been done by Tasso da Silveira. Whitman's "Americanism" was enlarged to include the three Americas. Carvalho's interest in the continent as a whole was not an isolated attitude but a reflection of Brazil's general awakening to a feeling of camaraderie toward its neighboring nations and an increasing interest in strengthening social and cultural ties with them. Brazilian intellectuals wanted to replaceor at least add to - their centuries of gazing across the Atlantic with an actual journey into the backlands of their own country and of the other American countries. They longed for an American discovery of America. As soon as Toda a America was published, many writers would call attention to the similarities between it and Leaves of Grass. Although the «Americanisms" in Leaves of Grass and in Toda a America are different, Whitman's impress is clearly present in several poems. In the poem «Brasil," for example, Carvalho echoes Whitman directly in idea and image and uses a melange of passages from «Salut au Mondel" and «I Hear America Singing." He delights in cataloging what he hears by transporting his poetic selfto different places in the country. Carvalho includes another poem that is connected to «Salut au Monde!," or more precisely to Section 4 of this poem, where Whitman describes what he sees. In «Entre Buenos Aires e

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WH I TMAN IN B RAZI L

Mendoza," Carvalho again makes use of the Whitmanian catalog and begins his lines with the repetition of «Eu vejo" C

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WALTER GRUNZWEIG

Whitman in the German-Speaking Countries Whitman's German reception can neither be separated from its broader European context nor from the center of Whitmanite activities in the United States. From the very beginning, German reception tied in closely with an international literary, artistic, and political avant-garde from which it received important ideas and to which it also contributed a good deal. The Whitman phenomenon in the German-speaking countries, therefore, proves that our understanding of reception processes may be incomplete if we dogmatically apply a bilateral and unidirectional model of cultural transfer. In Whitman's case at least, a multicultural network of relationships seems to be at work, which proves the emergence of an international literary and artistic community. By the same token, the story of Whitman's German reception would be far from complete if limited to the literary realm. Whitman's reception also covers a variety of nonliterary fields such as music, youth and proletarian cultures and subcultures, politics, and sexuality. This brief overview attempts both to sketch out the richness of the German Whitman tradition and to characterize the selections included in this volume. These reception documents, most of which are original translations, prove that

[ 160 ]

"reception," once taken out of the contemporary theoretical controversy, is still a very real and dynamic part of the evolution of world literature.

GREATER THAN WAGNER?

It is no surprise that the first German to take notice of Whitman, as well as his first translator, was a revolutionary and an exile. It took a revolutionary to appreciate Whitman's poetry and to value its socio-political implications, and it required an exile to discover Whitman in 1868. This was a time when Germany and Austria had just emerged from a nationalistic quarrel about the leadership among the German states, a time of autocratic rule and little democracy, far removed from the discussion of the issues raised by Whitman's poetry. Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810-1876) was outsider enough to appreciate Whitman, but his ties to Germany were strong enough to enable him to act as mediator. A former friend of Marx and a revolutionary poet, he was repeatedly forced into British exile, where he worked for the London branch ora Swiss bank while keeping up his literary work and especially his literary translations. By the time he became acquainted with Whitman's poetry through William Rossetti's British edition of Leaves ofGrass, he had already made a name for himself as a translator of serious poetry even in the United States, and it is no surprise that Whitman and his friends hailed Freiligrath's translations as a seminal victory for their cause. Although Freiligrath's translation of Whitman in the weekend edition of Germany's leading daily, the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, consisted of only ten poems, preceded by an introduction, it made a strong impression on the reading public. Freiligrath wanted to proceed with additional Whitman translations but was unable to do so, probably because his friends had managed to secure permission for his return to Germany at just that time. Yet his name remained connected to Whitman's. In the 1970S and 1980s Whitman editions in the German Democratic Republic still stressed the American's connection to a German revolutionary tradition starting with Freiligrath. The English translation of Freiligrath's introductory essay in the Augsburg paper (selection 1) is historical. It was facilitated by Whitman's friends, probably under the aegis of William D. O'Connor, Whitman's chief propagandist in that period. It was O'Connor who suggested to Whitman that "I write F.F. a letter, (to go with the package) explaining things generally, and making him as far as possible a master of the situation." 1 Freiligrath reports that the letter consisted of thirty-two sheets in which O'Connor outlined the "true" character of Whitman's poetry and mission. This is an example of the many attempts by Whitmanites to further their poet's overseas reception, conforming to Whitman's own dictum that it was important to him to be "admitted to and heard by the Germanic peoples." While Freiligrath's essay broke ground for Whitman in Germany, it hardly did justice to the essential modernity of the American's works. Freiligrath's selection

Walter Grunzweig

[161]

of poems, mainly from Whitman's Civil War poetry in Drum- Taps, reveals that he appreciated Whitman more for his political and social ideas than for his aesthetic program. What Whitman expressed was more important to Freiligrath than the mode of expression, although Whitman's poetry clearly raised aesthetic questions for him as well: "Has the age so much and such serious matter to say, that the old vessels no longer suffice for the new contents? Are we standing before a poetry of the ages to come, just as some years ago a music of the ages to come was announced to us? And is Walt Whitman greater than Richard Wagner?"

GRASHALME

It would be twenty years after Freiligrath's essay until the first book-length German translation appeared-neither in Germany nor in Austria but in Switzerland, which in the later 1880s was a haven for German dissenters from all walks of life. One of the ideological centers of German progressive thinking of this period about which we still know too little was a publishing house in Zurich. Its owner, Jakob Schabelitz (1827-1899), a friend of Freiligrath's during his London years and himself a radical, had published first editions of works by the iconoclastic Viennese poet, critic, and dramatist Hermann Bahr, the naturalist and socialist poets representative of «Youngest Germany," Karl Henckell and Arno Holz, and the Scottish-German anarchist and lyricist John Henry Mackay. Here, then, was a publisher ideally suited for a first edition of Leaves of Grass. The translators were an unlikely team - Thomas William Rolleston (1857-1920) was an Irish nationalist and Karl Knortz (1841-1918) was a German immigrant to the United States. Both men pursued political motivations with their translation. Knortz, an educator and cultural historian, had been working toward the democratic education of Germans throughout his life. In his view, both Germans and Americans of German extraction sorely lacked democratic traditions, and he hoped that Whitman's poetry would be more effective than political tracts in changing the minds of his people. Rolleston had his own agenda. He believed that Ireland would be freed from England only if the British Empire were confronted with a strong Germany. While he considered the German character solid enough, he insisted that Germans needed to be strengthened politically by thorough training in democracy. Both translators were in close touch with Whitman and his friends, and Whitman proudly approved of their activities. Of the two collaborators, Rolleston had the more sophisticated program. He believed that the Germans had lost their native creativity and ingenuity in British positivistic philosophy and needed to be brought back to their own idealistic philosophical traditions. This, he insisted, could only be achieved through a massive shock to the complacent German bourgeois sensibility, and he believed Whitman's poetry would provide the necessary voltage. With Whitman, Rolleston outlined an aesthetic program with political implications. Surprisingly, the first German edition of Leaves ofGrass, published in 1889 and [ 162]

WH I T MAN IN TH EGERMAN - S P EAKI NG COUNT RI E S

entitled Grashalme, was received well enough. While some critics did admit that they were puzzled about poems that looked as though they were copied from an encyclopedia, most admitted that something new had arrived on the German literary scene. The book seemed commensurate with the newness of the New World, which in the minds of most German-speaking Europeans - shaped by the American novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Charles Sealsfield-still had strong mythical dimensions.

THE GERMAN WHITMAN CULT

One of the most avid readers of Grashalme was Johannes Schlaf, who would become the leader of the German Whitman cult. Together with Arno Holz and Gerhart Hauptmann, German Uterary history credits Schlaf with the introduction of «naturalist" literary principles into German literature. However, given the strong subjectivist orientation of German philosophy and literature ever since Kant and the German romantics, this «naturalism" displayed a special quality. In his essay on Whitman (selection 2), a necrologue written in 1892, Schlaf explains how, through the example of Whitman's poetry, he had been able to escape the limitations of naturalism and discover the richness of his innermost self. He celebrates Whitman as a healer and a prophet of a new age of humanity. Deconstructing this rhetoric, however, we find that he read-and imitated- Whitman's poetry as an answer to the ills of modern existence: urbanization, alienation, and even dissociation of the self, all the issues we now consider to be critical in our judgment of modern civilization. It is characteristic of Whitman's German reception that, while his poetry was applied as therapy to the ills of existence in a modern world, it also accelerated the development of a modernist aesthetic. Although it sometimes promised to do so, Whitman's poetry never actually led back to holistic premodernist times but rather pointed forward to the disintegration of the self. This process, from a traditionalist viewpoint, reduced humans to a bundle of nerve endings. While German readers, aghast at the rapid technological and industrial development of their society, were looking toward. the American poet for assistance, the medicine they actually received was an aesthetic correlative to the newly industrialized culture from which they were attempting to escape. Schlaf seems to have understood the danger, because he celebrated the emergence of a «new humanity" with Walt Whitman, a humanity no longer grounded in the old value system but rather responding to external stimuli. At the same time, he popularized O'Connor's version of the «good gray poet," which became Germany's favorite image of Whitman. In Schlafs many articles on Whitman, in his translation of Henry Bryan Binns's biography and several other books, he always stressed the superhuman quality of the poet who was destined to deliver humankind. In this endeavor, he was supported by Horace Traubel, Ernest Crosby, and other Whitmanites who warmly approved of his activities. His most imporWalter Grunzweig

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tant contribution to Whitman's popularity in the German-speaking countries was a widely circulated translation of a representative cross section of Leaves published in a cheap, popular edition. It was through this 1907 edition that Whitman's work became the collective property of practically all German-speaking readers, thereby insuring.Whitman's astounding popularity. Given Schlaf's manifold activities relating to Whitman, it comes as no surprise that he was also in contact with French-speaking devotees of the "good gray poet": Emile Verhaeren, the celebrated Belgian poet; Henri Guilbeaux, editor of a French anthology of German literature in which Whitman's name appears frequently and later a collaborator of Romain Rolland's and a friend of Lenin's; and Leon Bazalgette, Whitman's French translator. Bazalgette once even suggested the foundation of a European equivalent to Traubel's Walt Whitman Fellowship International (for Hermann Hesse's disdain for such organizations, see selection 3), a plan that was never realized, probably owing to increasing nationalist tensions in Europe.

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

With Traubel, Schlaf shared a true partisan devotion to Whitman, which seems exaggerated and almost childish to the modern observer. Yet Schlaf and others did believe it necessary to "defend" Whitman against all negative criticisms: such critics were automatically denounced as "enemies." This echoes Whitman's own paranoia' and it became a permament feature of the international Whitman movement. One such villain, and Schlaf's archenemy, was Eduard Bertz (1853-1931), a close friend of the British novelist George Gissing. Bertz was an unlikely candidate for Schlaf's wrath. He had come to know Whitman during an early stay in the .United States and, after his return, published an article in which he praised Whitman exuberantly. Bertz sent this article, which appeared in 1889, to Whitman, along with the promise that he was going to "reveal" Whitman to the German people. After Schlaf's 1892 article, however, Bertz was forced to face the fact that Johannes Schlaf, not Eduard Bertz, was going to be Whitman's German prophet. Bertz, originally a socialist, devoted himself to a number of cal.;lses. He wrote ethical treatises and a book outlining a philosophy of the bicycle, and most important, he was active in the early German homosexual movement. The aim of the movement, led by Berlin physician Magnus Hirschfeld, was the legal emancipation of homosexuals. A petition to that effect, carrying the signatures of the majority of German and Austrian intellectuals and artists of the period, was submitted to the German government in 1899. Although it was denied, the petition gave the activists around Hirschfeld a chance to argue for their cause. In the same year, they began publishing a journal in which they tried to dispel scientifically the destructive myths about homosexuality. A regular series in this journal featured the contributions of homosexuals to human history. In 1905 Bertz published a long article on Whitman's homoeroticism, referring to him as a sexually inactive ho[164]

WHITMAN IN THE GERMAN-SPEAKING COUNTRIES

mosexual. In the· "psychopathological" language of the day, he called him an Edelurning (literally translated, a noble homosexual). Although not intended as such, Bertz's article was perceived by Whitman's followers, especially Schlaf, as an attack on the poet. Schlaf wrote a furious pamphlet in which he accused Bertz of slandering Whitman. Bertz misunderstood and believed that Schlaf and the "terrorists" of the heterosexual world wanted to repress Whitman's homosexuality in order to thwart the movement for homosexual emancipation. With everincreasing paranoia, Bertz wrote two books attempting to prove not only Whitman's homosexuality but also the existence of a plot by Whitmanites around the world to silence him. In fact, he went so far as to suggest there might be a homosexual conspiracy designed to "sell" Whitman's "homosexual ideas" to the world in the guise of "healthy" poetry. While all this may not seem to make Bertz a gay liberationist, we must remember that, at the time of this quarrel in the first decade of the twentieth century, the possibilities of the gay movement were much more limited than today. Advocates of homosexual emancipation, content with legal progress, considered any aggressive position taken by homosexuals as counterproductive and destructive. The article by Bertz presented here (selection 4) is a late contribution, published in the Jahrbuch fur Sexuelle Zwischenstufen, the journal of Hirschfeld's organization, in 1922. However, it reflects the arguments brought forth in the quarrel between 1905 and 1907.

SOCIALISM, ANARCHISM, EROTOCRACY

Apart from whatever effect the debate may have had on homosexual emancipation, Schlafs eventual "victory" was important for Whitman's continued popularity in the German-speaking countries. If Schlaf had not managed to deny Bertz's well-meant allegations, Whitman would probably not have been accepted in the German-speaking countries - the prejudices against homosexuality and homosexuals were too strong in Central Europe at that time. But since Bertz did not manage to convince the public, Whitman's progress was uninhibited. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, his significance for the development of German literature and German thinking was taken for granted. The German expressionists-from Franz Werfel, Johannes R. Becher, Oskar Maria Graf, and Armin T. Wegner to Franz Kafka-reported the enthusiasm with which they welcomed Schlafs translation of Whitman. This small booklet fit in every pocket and was carried by numerous activists: socialists, who found that Whitman supplied the much-needed spiritual dimension Marx had abolished from their creed; anarchists, who admired Whitman's refusal to follow aesthetic conventions as much as his call for disobedience and moral independence; members of an influential youth. movement, the Wandervogel, who reacted enthusiastically to Whitman's call to the "Open Road"; even nudists, who took certain passages from Whitman's poetry quite literally. Essays by Landauer and Bahr (seWalter Grunzweig

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lections 5 and 6) provide examples of the ways Whitman was read between the turn of the century and Hitler's takeover in 1933. Gustav Landauer (1870-1919), a friend of the German philosopher and theologian Martin Buber) is one of the most interesting personalities in the history of German literature and ideas. Throughout his life he attempted to combine a visionary mysticism with his version of anarchist socialism. Unlike the Marxists) Landauer abhorred power and violence as means toward an ideal society. Whereas social democratic ideologues justified their involvement in and support of World War I by quoting Whitman the wound-dresser who) they claimed) believed that participation in war was necessary to alleviate human suffering) Landauer stressed the antimilitaristic and pacifist tendencies in Whitman's poetry. For Landauer) Whitman's democracy consisted in the free association of human beings living together on egalitarian terms and sharing their everyday work. Landauer gave much thought to questions of human alienation and spiritual impoverishment) which the Marxists then believed could be put off until after their predicted decisive revolutionary change in politics and economics had taken place. In his view) spiritual and intellectual changes had to precede a new social order; a society based on traditional.thinking could never bring forth the new human relationships toward which socialism aspired. Whitman)s poetry would provide the spirit (Geist) Landauer predicted would serve as a guiding light for a new society based on small units of production) selfmanaged economic enterprises) and a daily routine requiring each member of society to be engaged in both intellectual and manual labor. Already within the capitalist system) small pockets with "new» human beings could develop) people committed not to nationhood but to a new way ofliving. When Landauer referred to Americans as a new and exemplary type of "nation») he meant they would overcome the old·nationalism in a new community comprising all nations. When Kurt Wolff) a well-known publisher and sponsor of German expressionist authors) asked Landauer in 1916 whether he would be willing to undertake a Whitman translation) Landauer enthusiastically agreed. The poems) and the edition as a ~hole) were to serve his pacifist politics during the war. Unfortunately) however) the war did not leave him time to complete his excellent translation) and afterward Landauer joined the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Government in Munich (November 1918-May 1919) hoping to implement his humanist ideas in practical politics. When the government fell) Landauer was arrested; shortly thereafter) soldiers killed him inside a prison. In the United States) a contributor to Max Eastman's leftist paper The Liberator and an observer of the events in Germany described Landauer: "A poet) a crusader) with the passionate dreaming soul of 1848. A sensitive man) a man whom every one loved; a devoted admirer of Walt Whitman) whose work he made known to Germany.... It was Walt Whitman and Tolstoy) never Marx and Lassalle) whom he hoped to realize in a new Bavaria.» Landauer's Whitman translations were finally collected and published by Wolff in a slender but beautiful volume in 1922. Hermann Bahr (1863-1934) an Austrian critic and dramatist) was a man de[ 166]

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voted to the avant-garde. A leader of the modernist members of the "Young Vienna" group (the term "modernism" in the artistic sense is sometimes attributed to Bahr), he attempted to break ground for any new movement that would further artistic and aesthetic progress. In a 1908 essay, he welcomed a new "barbarianism" in literature which was, in his view, the only adequate answer to the challenges brought about by emerging technological realities. Arts and humanities, he believed, were firmly grounded in old nineteenth-century traditions and thus were unable to cope with these challenges. If a later generation looked to art and literature to explain and interpret his period, only one author could be said to have given expression to this new era - Whitman. Whitman remained a constant in Bahr's life. The essay reprinted here was written on the centenary of Whitman's birth. In it Bahr still stresses the fact that Whitman sings the ((modern man." But Whitman's message had by now acquired broader meaning and appeal. Both Germany and Austria had become democratic republics, and intellectuals in both countries had to find a new place in their changing societies. What is the artist's place in a democratic society? What is the nature of democratic art? The questions that had so intensely preoccupied American romantics in their struggle for a national literature now came to haunt the Europeans. Related questions of nationalism preoccupied them as well. After the old monarchies fell, Central Europe presented itself as a colorful quilt of dozens of nations and nationalities. How would they relate to each other? These issues provide the background against which Bahr's essay must be read. The answers Bahr found in Whitman are original and explain, in part, Whitman's enormous popularity in the years following World War 1. The artist would have to be the universal human mediator between individuals, classes, and nations, and a democracy that could solve these problems would have to become an ((erotocracy."

A GERMAN CLASSIC

Whitman, Bahr emphasized admiringly, perceived reality through his sensuality-he "philosophizes with the phallus." Hans Reisiger (1884-1968), one of the great translators of the twentieth century and to whom German readers owe the "classic" two-volume translation of Whitman's work, expressed it much the same way. Reisiger "encountered" Whitman as early as 1909 and published his first translations in the leftist journal Das Forum at the beginning of World War 1. Whitman's true significance for his time, however, was not revealed to Reisiger until after the war. In the introduction to his first one-volume edition of Whitman's works, he emphasizes that only a quasierotic relationship among men and women (but especially men) could actually make German democracy work. He shared this curious idea, along with his passion for Whitman, with his close friend Thomas Mann. Mann, who publicly welcomed the publication of Reisiger's translation, had been politically conservative. With the breakdown of the Central European monarchies, Mann had to redefine his position, and he did so with the Walter Grunzweig

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aid of Whitman. Democracy, he now believed, could work only if what used to be a hierarchical order could be replaced by an erotic commonwealth. Eroticism and sexuality - the common denominators ofall human beings - could thereby serve as a glue to keep democratic society from disintegrating. Both Reisiger and Mann were aware of Whitman's homoeroticism and discussed it in connection with his poetry, especially the "Calamus" poems. In a series of surprisingly "public" statements, Mann and Reisiger both referred to the attachment of man to man as the "heartbeat of true democracy" and as the "life nerve of communal life of the future in all states and cities" (see selection 8). It is surprising that this openness was no longer cause for indignant outcries and public protests. Fifteen to twenty years following the debate between Schlaf and Bertz, Mann's and Reisiger's interpretation ofWhitman was apparently accepted - although we do not know how much of it was actually understood. With Reisiger's attractive two-volume edition (upon its publication Mann wrote an open letter that appeared on page one of the leading German daily; see selection 7), Whitman had become a "classic." He was now a recognized part of "world literature," a household word - at least in the households of the educated, artists, and intellectuals. This, however, also meant that the reception of his work became less spontaneous and dramatic. While Whitman's passionate rhetoric was much in demand in the turbulences associated with the war (when scores of German poets, mostly "messianic expressionists," imitated Whitman), the postexpressionistic poets of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) had much less affinity with the vitality of the American bard. Obviously, the Nazis had little use for Whitman's poetry. Although there were two or three attempts to enlist Whitman for national-socialist ideology by turning him into a "Germanic bard," he stressed democracy and internationalism too often to be useful to the ideology of the Third Reich. Yet, as Nazi poet Heinrich Lersch slyly observed, if the word "democratic" is exchanged for the word "volkisch" (i.e., belonging to the German people), Whitman might be of some use yet. Lersch was part of a group of poets who were Whitman devotees in their early years and who found that some of the rhetoric they had learned from Whitman was applicable in the Nazi context. Some of Whitman's imagery of blood, soil, and even women came fairly close to the Nazis' rhetoric of the German character, the German homeland, the German earth, and the German mother. The Nazis thus preempted the possibility of a wide use of Whitman's poetry for the antiNazi struggle waged by German exiles, and they also prevented a true Whitman renaissance after World War II. Although several new volumes of Whitman's works appeared after 1945, including a number of new translations, Whitman's reception since World War II has hardly equaled the enthusiasm of the years between 1889 and 1925. Whitman's reception in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, later the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a special case. But even the GDR, a country professing a "messianic" ideology, did not attempt to use the powerful appeal of Whitman's rhetoric. The excellent translation by the GDR author Erich [ 168]

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Arendt, who had come to know Whitman during his exile in Latin America, is hardly reminiscent of the passion of the earlier translations. Rather, Whitman seems to have been important as a point of convergence between the interests of mostly young GDR readers and the official cultural policies of the state. Because of the· interest shown in Whitman by revolutionaries such as Freiligrath, or the first Soviet commissar of culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky, or especially their own Johannes R. Becher, the soundness and usefulness of Whitman's poetry were guaranteed in the GDR, where it always remained available in cheap, attractive editions. The GDR audience, on the other hand, fascinated by America and American literature, was interested in Whitman as the representative of a foreign culture to which they had little access physically, intellectually, or artistically. In 1985 the first complete German edition of Specimen Days, translated by a GDR translator, was expertly edited by Eva Manske, a specialist in American literature from Leipzig, whose open-minded and inspiring afterword already anticipated the later developments in that country.

TALKING BACK TO WHITMAN IN GERMAN

Although the German-speaking literary world has acknowledged Whitman to be a classic author and even though he has become a subject of academic inquiry at German, Austrian, and Swiss universities, Whitman's poetry continues to provoke important reactions on the part of creative writers themselves. Lyrical replies to Whitman have always been a measure of his continuing vitality, and German poets have talked back to him frequently and energetically (see selections 9- 20). Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914), a poet, translator, and journalist, had a number of uses for Whitman's poetry. In Constructing the German Walt Whitman, I introduced «The Democratic Song of My Room," Morgenstern's parody of Whitman's poetry, which mocks the reception of Whitman more than it satirizes Whitman's poetry. Here I include a second «Whitman poem" which, in a much more earnest fashion, explores Whitman's internationalist theme, always a favorite among Germans. Morgenstern, with his extreme dislike of the German bourgeois life-style, obviously saw Whitman's globalist poetry and his lyrical America as antidotes to the stuffiness of German life. Arthur Drey was born in Wiirzburg, Germany, and shared his birth year1890-with many members of the expressionist generation. In 1910 he went to Berlin, where he became acquainted with Georg Heym, one of the most significant German expressionist poets. In 1911 he moved to Marburg and graduated with a doctorate in law two years later. He lived as a businessman in Frankfurt until 1938, when he was forced to emigrate to the United States. He died in New York in 1965. During Drey's short literary career, he contributed to the important expressionist journals Der Sturm and Die Aktion. His poem «Walt Whitman" demonstrates the expressionists' exaggerated adoration of Whitman as a human being, a poet, and a God-like giant. The poem not only reflects expressionist enWalter Grunzweig

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thusiasm for Whitman but is at the same time a measure of the alienation of these poets. Quite obviously, Whitman is the receptacle of the projections designed to compensate for their imagined and real deficits as poets and human beings. Their characterizations of Whitman with terms such as "Titan" or, in the poem by Carl Albert Lange, "Giant" suggest the degree to which the human individual is dwarfed by modern technology and industrial society. The violent emotions they ascribe to Whitman, as exaggerated as comic book characterizations, are indicative of the impossibility of expressing subjectivity in a mechanized and controlled society. The two poems by Swiss writers Gustav Gamper (1873-1948) and Hans Reinhart (1880-1963) appeared next to each other in a Swiss literary journal in 1919, along with Gamper's woodcut of Whitman. These poems are more constrained and devout, exuding a feeling of religiosity, but otherwise they are very similar to the exaggerated diction of the expressionists. Gamper, a native of Trogen, Switzerland, was a poet, musician, and painter. Whitman was the great experience of his life, a model to follow throughout his career. Gamper is best known for his work Die Brucke Europas (The Bridge ofEurope), a Whitmanesque attempt to create a kind of modern national "epic" devoted to his homeland. Die Brucke Europas is prefaced by Gamper's poem to Whitman included here. Reinhart, a friend of Gamper's, was born in Winterthur, Switzerland. Descended from a wealthy family, he studied in Germany, Switzerland, and France and traveled widely. He was influenced by anthroposophy after a trip to India in 1909 and devoted his career to poetry, drama, and prose, as well as to local cultural activities in his hometown. He also translated individual poems by Whitman. The poem by Carl Albert Lange (1892-1952) seems to be from the same expressionist school as Drey's, although Lange is not usually included with the expressionist movement. He was born in Hamburg as a son of a music teacher. In 1914 he was called to military duty and was a Russian POW from 1915 to 1919; these years in Siberia led him to literature. For the most part, he wrote poetry and prose, but he also translated from several languages. Although his work was repeatedly recognized by several prominent German critics and writers, Lange never established himself as a major twentieth-century voice in German poetry. Not all Germans, however, were uncritical admirers of Whitman. Already one year before the appearance of Lange's poem, in 1926, Kurt Tucholsky, one of the great German satirists, wrote a parody of "Salut au Monde!" Of the three Whitman parodies he wrote-one as early as 1913-this one is the most interesting. Tucholsky frequently used "Ignaz Wrobel" as a pseudonym. The "Walt Wrobel" in the poem is Tucholsky turned Whitman - or the other way around. Whitman's spiritualized epistemological optimism is shown to be unfounded; the wealth of all appearances could not possibly be grasped by the five senses. Paradoxically, the senses mediate mainly one thing-pain. Whitman's global panorama is here replaced by ridiculous local observations from the author's everyday life. At the very best, it is slightly humorous-something Whitman's poem is certainly not. In spite of this parody's implicit biting criticism, Tucholsky, like other writers critical of Whitman's optimism, nonetheless admired the American as a great poet. On a [ 170

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poetry manuscript by the young German poet Walter Bauer, he commented, «I am much more interested in your intellectual parents than in your professional aspirations. Just so there are no misunderstandings: this does not change anything, not in the least, about the value of your poems. Their rhymelessness is almost a matter of course ... and one just cannot avoid Whitman." 2 The sonnet by Johannes R. Becher (1891-1958) probably was written in the early 1940S when he was in Soviet exile. In his youth and early manhood, Becher was a devout Whitmanite; later he programmatically declared his conversion from Whitman to Marx and Lenin. Yet, like many other Marxists, he continued to admire Whitman, even though the sonnet form of the poem included here suggests that the nature of this admiration had changed. Becher, first minister of culture in the GDR, was an influential, although self-serving, cultural politician, whose interest in Whitman helped to insure the poet's «survival" in the GDR. Gabriele Eckart (born in 1954) is one of the most gifted lyricists in contemporary German literature. At the time she wrote the poem included here, she was still in high school. Her «search for metres," in the course of which she encountered Whitman, already points to the original poetry she would write in the future. By the mid-1980s, Eckart had become a dissident writer and eventually removed to the United States. The tradition of critical answers to Whitman started by Tucholsky is taken up by the German writer Jiirgen Wellbrock and the German-American writer Hans Sahl, but the criticism has become sharper and more pronounced. The poem by Wellbrock (born in 1949), a Berlin-based writer of poems, short stories, and radio plays, is explicitly critical of Whitman and Whitman's rhetoric, yet it testifies to the power of Whitman's voice and the necessity for every poet to come to terms with it. Wellbrock himself speaks of his «ambivalent" attitude toward Whitman, whose expansiveness and freedom he admires but whose rhetoric ·and glorification of strength and body offend him. The poem is a clever montage of Whitman quotations that have become famous in Germany; Wellbrock carefully refutes each one. No German poet has «talked back" in a more radical fashion to Whitman than Wellbrock. Sahl's «Schadelstatte Manhattan" C.. ' .

ROGER ASSELINEAU

Whitman in France and Belgium As early as 1860 the Saturday Press reprinted (or so it is claimed) an article published in Paris in the Bibliographie Imperiale (which never existed) announcing the imminent publication of a French translation of Leaves of Grass by one V.H. (Victor Hugo? Who knows?). After praising the eccentric aesthetics of the American poet, the article quoted samples of the forthcoming translation, but sooner or later readers could not help but realize that what they were reading was not a true translation but a comic parody, especially when they came to such lines as:

o mere! 0 fils! o troupeau continental! ... o toi-meme! 0 Dieu! 0 moyen divin! o forts de la Halle barbus! o poetes! 0 dormeurs! Eau de Javelle! The last line with the pun on "0" was particularly satirical, and the exclamation point, which had a lyrical value in the text, had become a point d'ironie. The whole article was a joke. l Actually, the first serious translation of some of Whitman's poems (preceded by a brief introduction) appeared only one year later [ 2331

in 1861. It was by Louis Etienne and was published in La Revue Europeenne (November 1, 1861) under the title «Walt Whitman, poete, philosophe et (rowdy.'" It was a severe indictment. Whitman was represented as «lawless" and embodying «American turbulence." He was «one more pantheist and St. Simonian in the land of emigration, ... that republic which is not a state ... but a still chaotic world." He practices «the religion of the flesh," Etienne also said, and «justifies crime and unreservedly lauds vice." Etienne, moreover, attacked the formlessness and incoherence of Whitman's poetry. Such a reaction was to be expected at a time when, under Napoleon Ill's rule, all liberal ideas were banned and democracy was regarded as synonymous with disorder and anarchy. Though Victor Hugo claimed he had put the red Phrygian cap on the dictionary in the 1830S and abolished all distinctions between «noble" and common words, French poets still wrote in a literary and ornate language, obeyed strict prosodical rules, and danced with their chains, as Voltaire had put it a century earlier, though he was no innovator himself. French readers therefore could only be horrified by Whitman's vocabulary and the lack of rhymes and set patterns in his poems. How could he dare speak of «the handkerchief of the Lord" when in translations of Othello, even Desdemona's handkerchief was chastely replaced by a diamond necklace. Whitman was definitely vulgar. The only acceptable American poet, in the opinion of French connoisseurs, was Edgar Allan Poe. Baudelaire had translated «The Raven" and «The Philosophy of Composition" two years before. Compared to Poe, Whitman was a savage and a «rowdy." Things did not change radically after the fall of Napoleon III. In 1872 an influential critic, well-read in English literature, Mme. Blanc (Therese Bentzon) could still write in the Revue des Deux Mondes (June 1,1872) an article entitled «Un poete americain, Walt Whitman: (Muscle and Pluck Forever.'" She condemned him for the crudity and bad taste of his naturalism and for combining the worst excesses ofVictor Hugo with «the most poisonous compositions of Baudelaire." (She must have been thinking of the six poems that a tribunal obliged Baudelaire to remove from Les Fleurs du mal in 1867.) In 1877 Henry Cochin, the brother of the famous surgeon, still traumatized by the horrors of the .Commune, violently protested in Le Correspondant against the dangerous anarchism and immorality of «To a Foil'd Revolter or Revoltress." This, he said, is «Democracy run wild, a form of insanity and megalomania." He also criticized the excessive length of some of Whitman's lines. He counted 101 syllables in one of them, whereas there were only 12 in the traditional alexandrine. It was really too much, he thought. There were some signs of change, however. In the very year when Mme. Blanc published her attack, a more liberal and open-minded critic, Henri Blemont, came to Whitman's defense in a series of three articles in La Renaissance Litteraire et Artistique (June 8, July 6, 13, 1872). «He is not Art," Blemont wrote, «he is much more than that, he is life. He is eminently personal, but he includes the whole world in his personality.... He is Lucretius's ideal poet. Not only nothing human, but also nothing superhuman or even subhuman is alien to him." It was a dithy[234]

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rambic eulogy based on the reactions of a number of English poets whose names Blemont mentioned in his article: W. M. Rossetti, Robert Buchanan, Moncure Conway, Roden Noel, and Swinburne, but it had no appreciable effect on French opinion, because apparently French readers were already discouraged by Whitman's lack of art and taste. This is the reason Leo Quesnel gave in an article in the Revue Bleue twelve years later (February 16, 1884), and, to his mind, Leaves of Grass would never be as popular in France as in Great Britain because Whitman's poetry was untranslatable. "How could one manage to naturalize it?" he asked. "When translated, Whitman is no longer Whitman: his free and rich language ... cannot be poured into the narrow and pure mould of romance languages." Despite this pessimistic affirmation, Quesnel himself translated "With Antecedents" for the Bibliotheque Universelle et Revue Suisse in February 1886, and a very gifted young poet, Jules Laforgue, in the same year very successfully translated several "Brins d'herbe" from that "astonishing American poet, Walt Whitman," as he said. They appeared in three issues of La Vogue (June 28, July 5, August 2, 1886), a little magazine edited by the symbolist poet Gustave Kahn and devoted exclusively to poetry. Whitman was now launched. After this, he was officially recognized and adopted by the symbolists. Further translations and laudatory articles about him multiplied and appeared in quick succession. There were some good translations in particular by Francis Viele-Griffin, a French symbolist who was born in America, and by Teodor de Wyzewa, who was of Polish descent. Viele-Griffin translated "Faces" and "A Locomotive in Winter" (to stress Whitman's modernity) in La Revue Independante (November 1888), and Teodor de Wyzewa translated a fragment of "Salut au Monde!" for the Revue Politique et Litteraire (April 1892).2 Unfortunately, Jules Laforgue could not continue his translations. He died the following year, but he was succeeded by Leon Bazalgette two decades later. In the meantime, as P. Mansell Jones has shown, Whitman's poetry and aesthetics seeped into the works of some of the symbolists, who like him, wanted to suggest meaning (particularly through music), rather than state it explicitly and who believed in being indirect rather than direct. 3 He was therefore regarded as a bold forerunner by Teodor de Wyzewa. 4 And indeed, there seems to have been a kind of preestablished harmony between Whitman and French symbolism. The two American-born French symbolists, Stuart Merrill and Francis Viele-Griffin, who could read Leaves ofGrass in the original text, were especially susceptible to his influence. 5 Their poems echo his ideas and themes, though they remained faithful to the rules of French prosody. Two Belgian poets were bolder: Emile Verhaeren and Maurice Maeterlinck. The former, in his later works, Les Villes tentaculaires (1895}, Les Visages de la vie (1899), Les Forces tumultueuses (1902), and La Multiple Splendeur (1906), broke with the traditional stanzaic patterns and used long lines somewhat reminiscent of Whitman's free verse. He also, contrary to the French symbolists, sang modern industry and large cities, as Whitman had done, but in a pessimistic mode. He rejected, he said, "accepted rules and official parodies" and preferred to translate "what affected his whole being, his bones, his muscles, his Roger Asselineau

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nerves, thanks to an infectious emotion which passed from exterior things to his soul ... a commotion ... a deep interior upsurge which supplied him with the rhythm ofhis verse." 6 The influence ofWhit_man on Maeterlinck was still stronger. In his Serres chaudes (1889), he imitated Whitman's repetitions of words and phrases, gave up rhyme and regularity, and created a variety of vers libre. In the poem entitled "Regards," he even closely followed "Faces" as translated by VieleGriffin. Vers libre caught on very slowly in France, but it definitely had its origin in Leaves ofGrass. The earliest examples were two poems in Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations (1886), "Marine" and "Mouvement," and Rimbaud may very well have read the translations of Whitman published in La Renaissance Litteraire in 1872. Edouard Dujardin says so in his "Les premiers poetes du vers libre," in the Mercure de France (March 1921), though he quibbled about the difference between French vers libre and Whitman's verset. Anyway, it was in vers libre that Francis Jammes wrote his nature poetry, De l'Angelus de l'aube a l'Angelus du soir (1898) and Vivre en Dieu (1910), and Paul Fort his innumerable Ballades franraises (18971937). Valery Larbaud, a rich cosmopolite who could read Leaves of Grass in English, adopted a technique reminiscent of Whitman's in A. O. Barnabooth-ses poesies (1908), but the tone he used was humorous, and he did Whitman a la blague. An important factor in the growth of Whitman's reputation in France at the end of the nineteenth century was a critical essay by Gabriel Sarrazin in La Nouvelle Revue (May 1, 1888)/ It began with an extremely sympathetic study of Whitman's pantheism. Sarrazin equated Leaves of Grass with the writings of the great Oriental mystics and also detected Hegelian traits in the poet's philosophy. Whereas Whitman had so often been described as an illiterate "rough," a wild "rowdy," Sarrazin emphasized his culture. "He had read everything we have read ourselves," he concluded, and he praised his art and the breadth of his thought which reconciles "Jesus and Spinoza, the Brahmins and the Encyclopaedists, Lucretius and Fichte, Darwin and Plato." Whitman's disciples were delighted with such an enthusiastic and well-balanced tribute from a European. As symbolism gradually lost its impetus, readers and writers became less sensitive to Whitman's art than to the content of his poems-to such an extent that the fragmentary translations by Daniel Halevy and Henry Davray, which appeared after 1910, were no longer in verse but in prose. 8 Halevy even tended to concentrate exclusively on Whitman's political message, and in his "Chants democratiques" he rendered "A Song for Occupations" by "Aux Ouvriers." A few years later, Elsie Masson, who also translated some of Whitman's poems (in free verse), characteristically entitled an article on the poet in the Mercure de France (August 1, 1907) "Whitman, ouvrier et poete." In the second decade of the twentieth century, Whitman suddenly ceased to be the cult-object of small coteries of aesthetes or leftist intellectuals. His reputation spread in the general public thanks to the almost simultaneous publication of his biography and a complete translation of Leaves of Grass by Leon Bazalgette. The [236]

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biography appeared first in 1908: Walt Whitman: l'homme et son oeuvre, in two volumes. It was published by an important publishing firm, Ie Mercure de France, which helped its diffusion. Bazalgette was an unconditional admirer of Whitman, and his book was a hagiography in the tradition of R. M. Bucke and Horace Traubel rather than an impartial biography. He had a tendency to speak through his heart as some people speak through their noses (to take up a phrase which Andre Gide applied to someone else). His Whitman was ~ supernatural figure, an inspired prophet rather than a mere poet, the founder of a new religion. As for Bazalgette's translation of Leaves ofGrass, it was similarly idealized but extremely awkward and flat, for he was no poet and was attracted to Whitman only by his religious and political themes. It followed the text too closely, and, though it rendered the poems verse by verse rather than in prose, it had no rhythm whatever. Yet, as it was the first time French readers had a chance to read the whole of Leaves ofGrass, it was extremely popular and was reprinted several times. Bazalgette's translation appeared at a time when a movement called unanimisme founded by Jules Romains was developing. Fernand Baldensperger defined its aim as ((a sort of pantheistic and pansocial vision where the poor individual is more or less absorbed." 9 There were undeniable echoes of Leaves ofGrass in Jules Romains's La Vie unanime (1908), which celebrated the collective soul of large city crowds, and in the poems of other members of the group (sometimes called ((L'Abbaye" [de Creteil]), Georges Duhamel and Georges Chenneviere, who were also, like Whitman, ((lyricists of the body." But Whitman did not remain the exclusive property of those who felt a transcendental presence behind material appearances and/or believed in Man-enMasse. The aesthetes were not long in reacting. They were grouped around the Nouvelle Revue Franraise (NRF), a literary magazine founded in 1905, which soon became very influential. They championed a new form of purified and rationalized symbolism, and Andre Gide was their leading spirit. He strongly objected to Bazalgette's translation,. which he thought both inartistic and ((prettified"((prettified" because, in particular, it completely censored Whitman's homosexuality. (Bazalgette systematically translated ((love" as ((affection.") It gave a distorted and idealized image of the poet. Gide therefore welcomed with enthusiasm the introduction that he had invited Valery Larbaud to write for a collection of translations of Leaves ofGrass which he planned to publish as early as 1914 and which was eventually published in 1918 under the title of Walt Whitman: Oeuvres Choisies (see selection 1).10 Larbaud completely destroyed the legend built around Whitman by his American admirers, denying, to begin with, that Whitman ever was a workman. He was a typographer who became a journalist, a great solitary, not a ((great camerado," and Bazalgette's biography was, in Larbaud's opinion, the work of a disciple rather than a critic. He explained the growth of Whitman's philosophy by the triple influence of the German idealists (and more particularly, Hegel), the formation of the American nation before his very eyes, and Emerson's Essays. He did not especially care for Whitman's ethics and politics and attached much more importance to the tone of Leaves of Grass, to what he called ((expression" Roger Asselineau

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and "effusion." He concluded that, though the doctrine it contained would sooner or later be considered mere deadwood like Dante's theological niceties, Whitman's poetry would be saved by its original rhythm and its style, which replaced the eighteenth-century "poetic diction" for which Wordsworth had in vain tried to find a substitute. Besides Larbaud's introduction, the 1918 Oeuvres Choisies contained Laforgue's and Viele-Griffin's translations, as well as new ones by Louis Fabulet, Andre Gide, and Larbaud himself. I I It was for several decades the best translation available and the most influential, though, by a strange aberration, "Song of Myself' was hardly represented at all. In the years immediately preceding World War I, more and more people were becoming interested in Whitman. They saw him as a "teacher of energy" (Maurice Barres's phrase). Phileas Lebesque in particular proclaimed: "We have had enough of depressing pessimists!" He saw above all in Whitman a prophet, the author of new Vedas and a Nordic poet like himself. I2 He contributed with Paul Fort, Chenneviere, Jules Romains, and Bazalgette to a review called L'Effort. A little later, Henri Guilbeaux founded a movement along the same lines, "Le Dynamisme," which took over L'Effort, now called L'Effort libre. The Swiss adventurer Blaise Cendrars obeyed Whitman's call, allons!, and sang with verve his journey across Asia in his Prose du Transsiberien (1913), which actually was not in prose but in free verse. Like Whitman, he thought that "merely existing is true happiness." During the Great War, which was a "European Civil War," Whitman once again served as a comforter, just as he had during the American Civil War. Bazalgette translated The Wound-Dresser (Le Panseur de Plaies) (1917). Georges Duhamel, then an army doctor, bore it in mind when he wrote La Vie des martyrs (1917). Like Whitman, he healed some men "by talking to them in a low voice, smiling at them or stroking their foreheads." Thanks to the combined influence of the Bazalgette and NRF translations, reinforced in 1926 by a translation of Specimen Days (Pages de journal) by Bazalgette, Whitman's influence reached its peak after the war in the 1920S. Only one author resisted it, Paul Claudel, who strongly disapproved of Gide's and Whitman's homosexuality and, for this reason, declined Gide's invitation to contribute to the NRF translation. Yet, his lyric poems, notably his Cinq grandes odes (19001908), were written in free verse akin to Whitman's. He probably had bought a copy of Leaves of Grass at the time of his first stay in the United States as French consul in New York and Boston. He said himself that he admired Whitman's cosmic inspiration, but he vigorously denied that he had ever been influenced by him as regards his ideas or his technique, which he claimed was wholly instinctive and personal. 13 Claudel was all the more shocked by Whitman's homosexuality when on April 1, 1913 (All Fools Day!), Guillaume Apollinaire published in the Mercure de France a description of Whitman's funeral, which, according to what an eyewitness told him, he said, had been an orgy, a pretext for sexual perverts to drink and make

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merry in the cemetery until dawn. This was strongly denied by Stuart Merrill and led to a polemic in which even Eduard Bertz, the German critic, took part. Despite this, Bazalgette became a more and more fervid worshiper of Whitman. In Le Poeme-Evangile de Walt Whitman (1921) he nearly deified him and interpreted Leaves ofGrass as a new Gospel. His friend Marcel Martinet, the literary editor of L'Humanite, the Communist daily, and one of the contributors to L'Effort, greeted its publication with the following words on July 13, 1922: "Dear Walt! ... he re-opened to me the Paradise of the world. The words of dear Walt! They are not the words of a writer, but truly revolutionary words which can raise a dispirited man to his feet...." Martinet was a poet himself, and his Eux et Moi: Chants d'identite in blank verse often reads like a serious parody of Whitman. 14 Andre Gide composed a new' version of his rather decadent Les Nourritures terrestres (1897). Under Whitman's influence it became Les Nouvelles nourritures (1935). Instead of calling the young man for whom he was supposedly writing Nathanael- "too plaintive" a name, he said-he now called him "comrade" and considered himself a "new Adam born for happiness." 15 The Proven